We see the me results from movies and television. It's because the vast majority of TV shows, movies and video games are made inside the continental United States and therefor reflect American prejudices. Now they will be making more games and such that have arabic villains. Detroit, Michigan based Resistence Records produced Ethnic Cleansing after 9/11 which allows participants to repeatedly kill non-caucasian villains. The founder was Canadian, reflecting similar ethnic prejudices north of the border. "Muslim Massacre" is another such video game. Video games made in other countries tend to have heros and villains of the same ethnicity. Final Fantasy is usually all ostensibly Japanese villains.
Yet, to be realistic, the results should be exactly reversed. The most regretable thing is our self, it's the sole reason we live in regret. But, externalization - a defense-strategy symptomatic of mental illness - in modernity, is the most common form of dealing with life's problems. It's not me, it's you. "I just can't find the right one." "The circumstances never permit..." etc..
Just saying; Ice cubes are good for many people for many occasions. People of all genders, shapes, hairiness, bad-teeth, fat, etc.. use ice cubes every day. Sometimes it isn't pool-side on a sunny mid-summer day. The scence for this photo was chosen because it conveys sub-conscious cues which a fat-guy on a stormy autumn day wouldn't. It may seem benign, but that is just how deep the problem is. And what for? They are ice-cubes, everyone knows what ice-cubes are. This advertisement could be black text "Smiley Faced Ice-Cube Tray" on a white background w/ an image of the ice, and just as much information about the product would be conveyed.
One of the most fascinating and easiest books to read on brains is; Altered Egos: How The Brain Creates The Self by Todd E. Feinberg. Alternatively, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus is also entertaining and informative. If you want something more challenging pick up The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach by Christoph Koch, The Astonishing Hypothesis by Francis Crick or Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore.
My aunt went to Trinidad and Tobago to check out a fabric distributer. While there she was given a "gift" of two bottles of wine, which she put into her luggage before boarding a plane back to Canada. Once seated on the plane she was confronted by T&T officials who removed her from the plan stating she was smuggling two bottles of liquid cocaine. She spent two years in prison in Trinidad and Tobago for drug trafficking, but claims she had no idea the "wine" was liquid cocaine. Be careful out there.
Just curious why there is an attractive young female's oral cavity approaching the sraw? Isn't this advertising with sex? Where is the Hairy 50-year old man lying back in his lazyboy, fisting a rum and coke, with salival spray projecting from his mouth post-belch?
I have a blog and nobody reads it. I have to come to where you are all having fun, lauging, joking and carrying on to make any points. Nobody seems to want to think or talk about these more base issues. Yet, metaphysical assumptions are implied within your communities.
For example: "Dana Vachon is an idiot." + "there are no deeper meanings in that."
Well as a matter of fact there are. What do you mean by "idiot"? Are you referring to the clinical usage as someone whose intelligence is equal to a 7 year old? Someone who is mentally challenged? Are you using it in it's original Greek usage to mean someone who is so self-absorbed as to be blinded to the external reality? Or are you using it in it's colloquial, punitive form of just spewing potentially hurtful comments with the implication that the target could have done otherwise?
You are making all kinds of metaphysical assumptions about what a human being is, is capable of, and the term "idiot" is acting like an umbrella for all of that.
I'm vaguely familiar with the song and artist, but I have spent a considerable amount of effort in determining what an individual is and whether or not such a thing possesses qualities like freedom (free-will).
What is an individual? It is often asserted that individuality is important, but what exactly is this all-important individual? We can see from science that we are intimitately dependent upon our environment, from the air we breath, to the barometric pressure of the surrounding atmosphere and the sociopolitical ethos of our era. On a more fundamental level we can see that any relation of one thing with another is a form of mutual interdependence. One thing cannot act freely upon another to determine some event without both things being fitted for the occasion. On many accounts what makes two objects suitable for sharing in an event is little more than their shape. This is certainly true of biology. So like puzzle pieces they fit together, and if any piece didn't have a shape appriopriate to fit into the puzzle, it wouldn't be in the puzzle. When the puzzle is reality, that means it don't exist. However, there may exist something which is adaptive and capable of fitting into many different places within the puzzle. This is what the human individual is like. Yet, the individual cannot change the puzzle to whatever it wants, it has to co-operate with the other individual pieces to form the entire puzzle.
In this sense an individual is determined by their environment, by the shared boundary that makes them an integral part of reality. The functional/causative relations which fit it to interacting with other objects. This should prove to be true on all levels of human psyche as well. All thoughts, emotions, words and so forth should be bounded by a specific set of functional relations to a larger system. If this is true, and it is, then we can examine our thoughts and emotions for their causative properties. Upon doing so we will either continue to operate on them or revise them to accord more with our conscience. Ultimately, however, we are not capable of going outside of our conscience, reasoning and the thoughts, emotions and such that enter spontaneously into the mind. We can only trace their causative influences and origins.
In that sense it's as if a seemless causal continuum acting upon itself gave birth to a individualized perception with a reflection of itself in the form of reason. Reason taps into the nature of reality and exposes its functional relativity. I suspect this happens basically the way Neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger describes in Being No One. Constraints like phenomenal transparency - where we are unaware of the causative origins of some phenomena like color - necessarily blind us to our non-individuality which gives birth to the perception of individuality.
It concerns me that concepts like freedom and individuality are championed with such emotion and determination. They are extremely elusive concepts that in my analysis, have no basis in anything. Through millennia of philosophy there has never been a single cogent description of freedom, the only thing that can be said about it is what it is not. It is not this cause or that cause, it is no-cause. Nor can it be described how it functions causatively to interact with the other pieces of the puzzle. It just gets tossed in without reason, without justification and it brings with it concepts of punitive/retributive punishment and concepts of responsibiliyt/accountability that may or may not have a basis in reality.
By analyzing the way people actually do talk we can glean the root cause of asserting individuality and freedom. It really depends on the circumstances. Often people will be asked to give an explanation for their actions, this is done regularly without suspicion. "Why did you do that?" one will ask. The word "why", the inquisitor of the bunch, demands a causative answer. It is the equivalent of saying "What caused you to act this way?" and without fail we provide answers. We never say "I acted freely". We may imply freedom of choice when we are due for some form of praise, but we do the exact opposite when we are due for some form of disapproval. After commiting a transgression we will fall back on the causes of our behavior to exculpate us. Thus, it appears that pride and shame factor into whether or not we choose to assert our free-will.
Anyway, I just wish more thought went into it. It is very hard to tell exactly what a person means in song. The traditional notion of free-will doesn't work for me. However, Henrik Walters "Natural Autonomy" and notions similar to it are realistic. With the exception of a few compatibilists like Daniel Dennett, most wouldn't dare refer to these concepts as "free-will". That term is pretty well retained for libertarianism.
Funny, the guy says "We are not restaurants" but at the same time most of their revenue is from food and as a patron you cannot bring in outside food. This is one of those cases of someone desiring a conclusion and coming up with reasons that are meant to support that conclusion but which aren't rational to the unbiased person. You sell food, tell your customers what's in it.
I've seen this before too. I was leaving my apartment one day and found a cat with its head stuck in a tin can. I just pulled it off and the cat ran away. I guess it wasn't very tight, but the cat couldn't get it off itself. Sad what our litter does to creatures in the environment.
No way Jose. I don't even own one. See, the passage is broken into parts, and the last part "..for it is better to marry than to burn with passion." is actually a logical statement that can be weighed completely independent of any doctrine, creed or anything else. I'm merely looking at what is being said and weighing the truth of it for myself. The Bible is one of many texts that interest me in this regard. Others include the Baghavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Qu'ran, Torah and the writings of St. John of the Cross, Omar Khayyam, Rumi and Al-Gazahli. They are all interesting teachers, though they come from different schools; Hinduism, Daoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Sufism respectively. It's more just about the actual truth of what they are saying and not the categories. So no, not a "bible thumper".
Just a thought. Isn't it possible that excess blood to the brain will carry with it excess amounts of neurotransmitters that will cause brain damage. Something like the way excess amounts of glutamate cause neurodegenerative diseases like Lou Gherig's Disease, or how excesses of cortisol in the blood circulating the brain can cause damage to the thalamus and a person's emotional responses (PTSD). Or raise what they call Intracranial Pressure (ICP) to cause Hperaemia?
Nah, nah, it's harmless, don't worry about it. Hyper-what?
So I always knew that high academic achievement is not the equivalent of seeing through the frailty of the egotistically-gratifying prejudicial club mentality that aflicts all of humanity. No doubt some of these people are sociologists who examine the affects of in-group/out-group behaviors. Which reminds me of the central problem I have with soft sciences, they tend to look at how people are, and give justification, instead of look at how people could be and avoid justifying any behavior. "Well, I'm evolutionarily predetermined to conform to some kind of a group that highlights an aspect of myself which I enjoy taking pride in. Therefor, let's start a club for 'people who enjoy taking pride in some aspect of themselves and sharing that pride with others of a similar attitude and trait'. It'll be cool, because we are evolutionarily determined to be that way." "I'm not that way myself. What does evolution say about that?" "You are a dying breed!"
My breed is human, I belong to a club called "Animal" and "living organism". Though, they are merely for descriptive purposes, sometimes I'll ascent to white, male and "30 something" for descriptive purposes. But none of these are what I'd call a club I subscribe to. They are just descriptive categories, because as Kant implies we can't do much without them. If my hair grew long, because I wasn't bald, and didn't cut it, is that something I've personally accomplished worthy of pride? Or am I just taking pride in whatever I can, whether or not I had any control in determining the matter. Ought I to be proud to be a Animal-Human-Male-30-something-caucasian-high-IQ-long-haired-ectomorphic-philosophical-type? Who's with me? We can have all kinds of egotistically gratifying praise-fests, we all feel good like we just took part in a circle-jerk. Sorry, sorry, I'll stop.
For example: "Dana Vachon is an idiot." + "there are no deeper meanings in that."
Well as a matter of fact there are. What do you mean by "idiot"? Are you referring to the clinical usage as someone whose intelligence is equal to a 7 year old? Someone who is mentally challenged? Are you using it in it's original Greek usage to mean someone who is so self-absorbed as to be blinded to the external reality? Or are you using it in it's colloquial, punitive form of just spewing potentially hurtful comments with the implication that the target could have done otherwise?
You are making all kinds of metaphysical assumptions about what a human being is, is capable of, and the term "idiot" is acting like an umbrella for all of that.
What is an individual? It is often asserted that individuality is important, but what exactly is this all-important individual? We can see from science that we are intimitately dependent upon our environment, from the air we breath, to the barometric pressure of the surrounding atmosphere and the sociopolitical ethos of our era. On a more fundamental level we can see that any relation of one thing with another is a form of mutual interdependence. One thing cannot act freely upon another to determine some event without both things being fitted for the occasion. On many accounts what makes two objects suitable for sharing in an event is little more than their shape. This is certainly true of biology. So like puzzle pieces they fit together, and if any piece didn't have a shape appriopriate to fit into the puzzle, it wouldn't be in the puzzle. When the puzzle is reality, that means it don't exist. However, there may exist something which is adaptive and capable of fitting into many different places within the puzzle. This is what the human individual is like. Yet, the individual cannot change the puzzle to whatever it wants, it has to co-operate with the other individual pieces to form the entire puzzle.
In this sense an individual is determined by their environment, by the shared boundary that makes them an integral part of reality. The functional/causative relations which fit it to interacting with other objects. This should prove to be true on all levels of human psyche as well. All thoughts, emotions, words and so forth should be bounded by a specific set of functional relations to a larger system. If this is true, and it is, then we can examine our thoughts and emotions for their causative properties. Upon doing so we will either continue to operate on them or revise them to accord more with our conscience. Ultimately, however, we are not capable of going outside of our conscience, reasoning and the thoughts, emotions and such that enter spontaneously into the mind. We can only trace their causative influences and origins.
In that sense it's as if a seemless causal continuum acting upon itself gave birth to a individualized perception with a reflection of itself in the form of reason. Reason taps into the nature of reality and exposes its functional relativity. I suspect this happens basically the way Neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger describes in Being No One. Constraints like phenomenal transparency - where we are unaware of the causative origins of some phenomena like color - necessarily blind us to our non-individuality which gives birth to the perception of individuality.
It concerns me that concepts like freedom and individuality are championed with such emotion and determination. They are extremely elusive concepts that in my analysis, have no basis in anything. Through millennia of philosophy there has never been a single cogent description of freedom, the only thing that can be said about it is what it is not. It is not this cause or that cause, it is no-cause. Nor can it be described how it functions causatively to interact with the other pieces of the puzzle. It just gets tossed in without reason, without justification and it brings with it concepts of punitive/retributive punishment and concepts of responsibiliyt/accountability that may or may not have a basis in reality.
By analyzing the way people actually do talk we can glean the root cause of asserting individuality and freedom. It really depends on the circumstances. Often people will be asked to give an explanation for their actions, this is done regularly without suspicion. "Why did you do that?" one will ask. The word "why", the inquisitor of the bunch, demands a causative answer. It is the equivalent of saying "What caused you to act this way?" and without fail we provide answers. We never say "I acted freely". We may imply freedom of choice when we are due for some form of praise, but we do the exact opposite when we are due for some form of disapproval. After commiting a transgression we will fall back on the causes of our behavior to exculpate us. Thus, it appears that pride and shame factor into whether or not we choose to assert our free-will.
Anyway, I just wish more thought went into it. It is very hard to tell exactly what a person means in song. The traditional notion of free-will doesn't work for me. However, Henrik Walters "Natural Autonomy" and notions similar to it are realistic. With the exception of a few compatibilists like Daniel Dennett, most wouldn't dare refer to these concepts as "free-will". That term is pretty well retained for libertarianism.
No way Jose. I don't even own one. See, the passage is broken into parts, and the last part "..for it is better to marry than to burn with passion." is actually a logical statement that can be weighed completely independent of any doctrine, creed or anything else. I'm merely looking at what is being said and weighing the truth of it for myself. The Bible is one of many texts that interest me in this regard. Others include the Baghavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Qu'ran, Torah and the writings of St. John of the Cross, Omar Khayyam, Rumi and Al-Gazahli. They are all interesting teachers, though they come from different schools; Hinduism, Daoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Sufism respectively. It's more just about the actual truth of what they are saying and not the categories. So no, not a "bible thumper".
Nah, nah, it's harmless, don't worry about it. Hyper-what?
My breed is human, I belong to a club called "Animal" and "living organism". Though, they are merely for descriptive purposes, sometimes I'll ascent to white, male and "30 something" for descriptive purposes. But none of these are what I'd call a club I subscribe to. They are just descriptive categories, because as Kant implies we can't do much without them. If my hair grew long, because I wasn't bald, and didn't cut it, is that something I've personally accomplished worthy of pride? Or am I just taking pride in whatever I can, whether or not I had any control in determining the matter. Ought I to be proud to be a Animal-Human-Male-30-something-caucasian-high-IQ-long-haired-ectomorphic-philosophical-type? Who's with me? We can have all kinds of egotistically gratifying praise-fests, we all feel good like we just took part in a circle-jerk. Sorry, sorry, I'll stop.