Great discussion, thanks for sharing your perspectives and sources as well! Good luck on your inquiries!
Juice
joined 6 months ago
Formally as in have had a university publish books and articles that I've written on it? No, I'm afraid I have very little university education, I'm largely self-educated. I support people having the opportunity to go to college, but my life just didn't work out like that. I'm all libraries, discussions, book sales, book clubs, writing and IRL political organizing. I've had some articles published but most of my writing is in notebooks.
I won't bore you with bio details, but after sort of rejecting Harris's vulgar determinism, I eventually discovered Rick Roderick's lectures on Philosophy and Human Values. The video quality is pretty old, but as a survey of western Philosophy course, I found this extremely useful and compelling. His course on Neitzsche is also very good. His course on 20th century philosophy, its first episode, Masters of Suspicion is a passionate defense of the self, free will, as well as the validity of exploring these questions.
I'm currently pulling on a thread where I am spending a lot of time thinking about Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx, the short but famous formulation wherein Marx "turns Hegel on his head." Feuerbach's formulation of God that begins the process of turning Hegel's logic against Hegel's own conclusions, established god as the embodiment of humans own best qualities, and externalizing them as an unreachable other, and how it functions as a tool of repression and intellectual domination finds some common ground with Harris's antireligious atheism. But this thread leads us closer to a kind of humanism, whereas Harris's atheism leads us further away from it. Its like atheism's main disagreement with religion is that it believes that science and industry should be mechanism that alienates us from our selves and each other, not the church. Personally, I would prefer not to be alienated from myself or from other people by any extrinsic mechanism of repression; I'd rather throw it off entirely.
They would have to have their own sorts of media
Disagree. Watch Reds.
Did you say "do Gladio shit"? Like enlist fascists, virulent anti-communists that they are, to carry out terrorist attacks against civilian populations to then blame on communists in order to crush the influence of socialists in government and justify purges of socialists and communists from every sphere of life? That gladio shit?
The revolution will not be won by beautiful dead, tears in their eyes, clutching their rifles. It will be won by a political revolution of the working class for the benefit of all. There will certainly be fighting, of which the internationale sings about explicitly:
No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we’ll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They’ll break ranks and fight no more.
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We’ll shoot the generals on our own side.
No, the Internationale!
Oh enshittification is coming for Windows. In the future. Like it hasn't happened yet or wasn't the first and worst of these companies for it to come for. But something that hasn't happened yet, not in the past. Interesting.
Okay, I apologize I went back and read your first post which said something like "the self doesn't exist is a fun concept to play with" when I was pretty sure you had said just "the self doesnt exist." I'm sitting here trying to find the thread that connects "the self doesn't exist" with your seeming acknowledgement of every aspect of it.
I agree its useful to test "wrong conclusions" for the reasons you state. You end up constructing consistent logic justifying it, and can witness for yourself where the reasoning goes wrong, and can speculate as to why. I think it makes relating to people convinced by faulty logic and conclusions easier to relate to, as well as gives you a hint to where their reasoning is off and you cans start to argue against it
But what is experience, how can you find experience without a self doing the experiencing? I'm not trying to put it on you but it is consistent with your logic, as I understand it
I haven't played them since they first came out, practically a lifetime ago. Actually now that I think about it my friend is really into halo lore I wonder if they saw the show.
It was hokey but I liked it. And yeah I thought it ended really strongly but there's no plan for a 3rd season
I played the first two
Racial equality is a communist plot and that's why communists are good actually