1mo ago

Enlightenment

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There was some relief in hearing people from way before my time putting words into jumbled thoughts that I had. Made me feel a little less alone. But it is also depressing how many people would actively shun it, thinking it is a complete waste of time (especially from my STEM classmates). Philosophy is also the first time my mind is actively challenged and engaged in school. I'm fortunate to have a very good teacher and I leave his class with my mind blown every time. And of course the existential dread.
All in all 10/10 life changing
- My reaction when I first got philosophy classes in highschool = yaaaaay. My reaction when we found out we would only study the history of philosophy, but never engage in our own = fuuuuuu
- I was going to say "in my experience philosophy is one of those subjects where the passion/enthusiasm of the teacher/professor makes or breaks the class experience".
  Then I realized I've never had someone who didn't deeply love philosophy try to teach it to me. And like you I've had incredible experiences with it, life changing for sure.
- I took a philosophy of science class as an undergrad that was really good, and attracted folks from a wide variety of STEM majors (tho the philosophy prof didn’t really know enough science for some of the discussions he was leading and managed to logically disprove his own platforms several times..)
  It got me into stuff like metaphysics, which was both freeing and terrifying. Especially for someone who is into neuroscience..
  
  Neuroscience and metaphysics is definitely a combo...
  When I was in undergrad our school had a ecology-philosophy ethics committee and I've taken classes with all the profs involved as a zoology major. Philosophy of Biology was definitely one of my favourite class I've taken. The way everything clicks together neatly and adding to each other is so satisfying.

Philosophy is the disease for which it should be the cure.
― Herbert Feigl, Inquiries and Provocations: Selected Writings 1929–1974

Depends on the philosophy you are reading.
I like the stoics because it's about being a virtuous person. Many of the core texts we're written 2000 years ago but still hold up (mostly).
A lot of the teachings were incorporated into the bible but stoicism itself is religion light, although some of the authors held religious beliefs their sense of right and wrong wasn't predicated on eternal damnation.
However, you could read some of their writings as pro suicide, so trigger warning.
Is there a good philosophy instance on Lemmy?
- Only a couple small ones, not much activity...
  
  Shame. I think these instances just need a core group to get things moving. Then they build momentum.
  Hypocrite alert: I have not done this.

Honestly doing a philosophy degree hoping for existentialism it was more like:
"Best I can do is Wittgenstein truth tables and quantifier predicate logic"
- tell me more
  
  It depends where you study but if you end up at an institution which follows the analytic tradition then many of your classes will be more like discrete mathematics than a typical humanities degree.
- Try out the French
  
  Let's not put Descartes before the horse

Schopenhauer & Hegel: allow us to explain why existential dread is considered the optimal outcome!

More like "I'm not going to answer your questions. Best I can do is give you new unjustifiable perspectives on old thoughts." One of the points of philosophy is to theorize on matters outside the domain of science.

Yeah, I always feel like Chidi making peep chili when I think about philosophy.

We live in a very strange society when men like these become rich and famous.

Even enlightenment isn’t always liberating.
- It is
  
  Are you saying yes it is the case that enlightenment is not always liberating?
  Or are you refuting what I said, saying enlightenment is always liberating?

I feel like research neuropsychology is a better option personally. Understanding human decisionmaking is the crux of making sense of the world, and the physical structures of the brain are where that originates. Trying to make sense of its outputs without diving into the nuts and bolts (or neurons and axons I suppose) of the machine itself is always going to be very challenging. It's still a very young field, so there's not always that much there yet, but that just means a lot of work is available to be done.
Not that philosophy doesn't have its own merits in other ways.
- I think you're just getting into the mind body problem. The main problem with just focusing on the mind, is that it's makeup and thus its outputs are very dependent on the body and the environment the body inhabits.
  The way we tend to delineate the mind from the body is mainly the byproduct of "science" that has fallen by the way side. The more we discover about the mind, the more we discover that there is no natural delineation from the body.
  For example a lot of physical reactions happen solely between the peripheral and the spine, never including the brain. We have neurons and axons separate from the cns located through the body that can interact with microbes. We've known for quite a while that if you sustain a mobility affecting injury, that the physical structure of your brain will eventually change in response.
  Unfortunately a lot of how we study the brain independently from the body was influenced by people like frued, who set up a whole education system that tries to delineate mind from body.
  
  Yeah, that's a good point. You certainly cannot limit your study of the nervous system to exclusively the brain.

The key realization is that the existential dread isn't the final destination, but a starting point of acceptance.

I'm fine with it.

The truth hurts
Let's make a philosophy out of that!

formal philosophy, maybe.
idiot philosophy is where the party is at.

Philosophy is so boring and abstract when treated as an isolated field. Just recognize a principle or two already and realize you are, like most people, a socialist.

I love my philosophy training. one of my professors was a logician, who taught 2 separate courses on philosophy of science, and 3 logic courses culminating in one on epistemics. I feel like the single most prepared person in my life to deal with the modern media landscape, and practicing my skills each day keeps me sharp.
I literally only consume right wing news. left wing news uses a lot of the same pedestrian rsophistry, but I hate beating up on people ostensibly on my team, or feeling like they're the ones lying to me. I have no such compunction about Glenn Beck, mark Levin, or the chuds on YouTube, and so I never pull my punches and actually complete my analysis of their rhetoric (in my own head).

35 comments