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RE: I Am Therefore I Harm

in #philosophy7 years ago (edited)

Thanks for pointing me to this post. It definitely gave me food for thought, and I've plenty of more thinking to do, as the journey to understanding is, literally, interminable.

One thing I reckon I can offer up is that Thich Nhat Hanh said in 'Anger' that anger is the child of fear. If one follows this line of thought, it becomes apparent that hatred isn't really anything more than fear. It isn't the opposite of love, it is an aspect of it. I actually agree with @jaki01 that if there is an opposite of love, it is indifference.

I agree with your thesis in general, but feel I am (and we, as H. sapiens, are) incapable of parsing the full extent of meaning. We are really insignificant specks of mud relative to meaning itself, and to think otherwise is sophomoric hubris. I don't mean to accuse, but I may not be capable of expressing what I believe in a manner that isn't perceived as accusation. When I say I am but a speck, and so are we each and all, some folks will take that as an insult, contrary to the certainty of our sublimity Shakespeare relates we are.

I don't believe in duality, but in singularity, in a sense. A way to explore that sense of meaning is that there isn't only light and dark, but shades.

Also, I'm offended by determinism =p I'll follow up the link to Schopenhauer, whom I haven't read, but doubt I'll be convinced regardless of his lucidity and loquacity. I can humbly believe that our incapacity to comprehend can lead us to be certain we have comprehended a thing beyond us, so even if my grasp of his rationale leads me to feel certain sure he is right, and we don't have free will, I have but to humbly recognize I'm simply incapable of proving him wrong - and that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

I wanted to enter into this conversation here, rather than on @soo.chong163's post, as he can follow it here, or enter into it there as he prefers, but this is where you treat of the issue, so it seemed appropriate to come here.

Thanks!

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You always give thoughtful and eloquent responses! You're the kind of reader many a writer here on steemit hopes for.

I can agree that there's an element of fear in anger and hatred, because without fear (or threat) hatred and anger probably become mere amusement. I hope though that's not interpreted in the wrong way, where fear somehow illegitimizes the concern, like "fear of gay people" etc. Some fears are legit, like fear of Hitler's rising power before everything became evident. Amusement is sometimes peddled as the superior man's default reaction to everything, as though he's supposed to be bereft of any fear/hatred etc., which is ridiculous.

About being "incapable of parsing the full extent of meaning", I view meaning as any other discipline. Touching it doesn't mean solving it completely. I don't see why we should be specks when it comes to meaning but hills when it comes to, I don't know, medicine. If we can figure out that the universe began with a big bang, we can make strides toward demystifying meaning, too.

About determinism, I'm afraid, as I've already stated in the comment you read, it's considered solved! ) If you believe we are 100% material beings, and a rock that is also 100% material has no free will, there is no point at which added material complexity creates free will. Free will is not an emergent property. There's no way a material thing, no matter how it's organized, can suddenly cease to obey all the same laws of nature that any other material thing obeys. I always find the following question helps to clarify things and people's intuitions, and gets at the core of the debate: at time x-1 (i.e. whatever time in the past), if everything had been exactly the same, could you have done otherwise? Given the same neural makeup, all the same experiences, influences, everything exactly the same, is there any chance you would've chosen differently? This is essentially the same as asking if a coin toss could ever yield a different result than the one it did the first time round, had everything else remained exactly the same. I don't see how or why the answer could differ depending on whether we're talking about living or non-living things, given that one is a materialist.

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