Entelecheia
8mo ago
BG3 is slowly but surely turning into one of those games I enthusiastically binge in the beginning but lose interest and possibly never finish or only finish with substantial effort. I used to worry I was just losing the capacity to appreciate games for some unclear reason, but earlier this year I belatedly discovered Final Fantasy VII and was kind of fanatically gripped from start to finish. So maybe the problem isn't that I don't like games, but that a lot of games are just missing writing that gives me a reason to care about the scenario or characters, and so I end up not really caring to see what happens.
Entelecheia
9mo ago
Antibiotics are the most common prescription for Rosacea, but topical Ivermectin is the 'it' new thing.
I've tried both of these with not much effect unfortunately. Ivermectin in both topical and pill form even lol. I should probably go back to a dermatologist regardless though, as you mention it's good to keep up with new developments.
The problem doesn't lie in food (like an allergy), the problem lies in your gut biome.
I've wondered if this might have something to do with it, because I seem to have exhausted most conventional explanations.
Can you try drinking homemade milk kefir and see if that's a trigger?
Dairy in general doesn't seem to bother me very much. I haven't looked too deeply into the gut side of things but I probably should because I have few other leads and it seems to have something to do with digestion. I take a probiotic pill regularly but I imagine that is not the optimal approach. I do like the kefir idea and might try that next.
Wow, I haven't absorbed all of this yet but I first wanted to say thanks for writing it up and taking my problem seriously, it's very comprehensive. I've actually been wondering prior to this discussion about the different-fat-types explanation because it seems to fit with dairy being largely OK and non-beef proteins not. It also fits with the fact that this was a permanent fixture of my life until I tried a radical diet because of the high prevalence of soybean oil and other similar oils in American food. Even then, though, I have noticed other triggers, like adding flour to the beef roasts I make as a thickener, so I think gluten may be a problem too, but I may have to try again to confirm since that was a while ago.
I fear there may be no solution though, even if it's possible to ultimately identify what is causing the problem, which would leave me in the possession of a permanently broken digestive system requiring the long-term consumption of a dubiously healthy diet if I don't want to look terrible all the time, and that scares me a lot...
Entelecheia
1yr ago
The new tactic is presuppositional apologetics
The new tactic where exactly? I have no idea what presuppositional apologetics is; probably a more fruitful tactic is real engagement with the history of philosophy and with the arguments that have been proposed by the best thinkers in it. Cosmological arguments for example are absolutely treated as worthy of serious engagement by even atheist philosophers of religion.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
I can try, sure. I'm not too familiar with online resources because I've mostly learned about it through my attempt to engage deeply with the history of philosophy, which I strongly recommend to everyone here; if I had a "thesis" of which I hoped to persuade readers, it would be this. There is much more than a lifetime's worth of rich content in the great authors, and much of it is little known today.
I know of one person on reddit who was particularly interested in classical theism and wrote a series of posts on one of Aquinas's cosmological arguments here.
My entry to this way of thinking was by reading some books by Edward Feser, who has a blog here that is generally interesting. While he writes from a particular (i.e. Thomistic and Catholic) perspective, a lot of his concern is to defend general principles of classical Western metaphysics against modern or contemporary philosophical paradigms, so reading him gives a decent overview of the Hellenic philosophical mentality from which all of this springs. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide and Five Proofs for the Existence of God are great; the first will provide a systematic overview of the building-block concepts like act/potency, form/matter, essence/existence, etc. and culminates in an argument for theism; the latter is, as the title indicates, all about natural theology.
For those whose interest goes beyond the beginner level, I would recommend just digging into the history of philosophical thought on metaphysics and theology. Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy is a great resource, as is Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy. Both are quite long, but that's what it takes to do the subject matter justice.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
It's a meaningless argument against the concept of knowledge itself
No, it's an argument against your proposed criterion of knowledge on the basis of it being self-contradictory.
does absolutely nothing to actually advance the notion of god existing
That's because it's an argument whose goal is to figure out what knowledge is, not whether God exists. If you want arguments that advance the notion of God existing, you should look at those, rather than looking at an argument about knowledge and observing that it doesn't prove that God exists.
It is the study of being as such, as distinct from the special sciences which study being under some aspect, as we might say roughly and imprecisely that modern physical science studies being as corporeal and quantitative (philosophical physics like Aristotle's studies being as corporeal but not quantitative, heh).
So metaphysics is about rising above particular kinds and concepts of being to the most general analysis of being. And there we get to questions like: we know there's at least one sort of being (the corporeal kind), is that it, or is there a kind of being that is incorporeal or supersensible? That question is the main theme of Plato's corpus.
And it studies categories applicable to being in general (not just one kind of being), like causation, or contingency and necessity. So there you will get questions like whether the existence of contingent beings ipso facto implies the existence of a necessary being, and what attributes a necessary being must have in virtue of its necessity. Or whether a chain of causes implies a first element in it and what we can say about such an element based on the properties it must have in order to be the first element in such a chain.
This may (or may not, like I said I'm still learning) help to explain why the validity of metaphysics as a discipline that grasps being as it is is so critical for classical theistic arguments. If all of these concepts - causation, contingency, necessity etc. - are just a matter of how we think about the stuff that appears to us, we can't use it to draw conclusions that go beyond what appears to us, because it's basically just a schema for organizing all of that (this is why Kantianism threw such a major wrench in philosophy). But if it's grasping being as it is, then we can.
The point being to describe people who were far from Republican moderates pulling the lever in favor of abortion rights against ban attempts when the chips were down.
Right, and the point here is that (speaking as a pro-life person) if a condition of us getting their vote is that we don't do anything to ban abortion, we don't want it. So if you are arguing that we should moderate (in the sense of giving up on making abortion generally illegal) because of this, my response is no. If you are arguing that as a descriptive matter we'll have a harder time winning because of this, that may be right, but the alternative is a hollow victory that doesn't accomplish enough of our goals to make it worth it for us, so it's worth the risk.
If the proposal is a less stringent ban that actually gets us a lot of what we want but not all of it, like a total ban but with certain specific exceptions, then I think a lot of people would be open to considering that. But safe legal and rare isn't good enough.
Entelecheia
7mo ago
without the guilt trip of having to make up an excuse for not attending a wedding or some other shit that you don't want to do
The thing I don't want to do is work, because I'd rather be doing various things that a dependency on work is keeping me from doing (like exploring the world or full-time intellectual pursuits), so this doesn't really seem like autonomy to me.
Entelecheia
8mo ago
I'm on Windows 11 yeah. Not sure if it's on other versions.
a car is the most pleasant, efficient way to get anywhere more than a few blocks away
A car is the most pleasant, efficient way to get anywhere more than a few blocks away if everything is designed around the assumption of everyone going everywhere with a car, such as surrounding everything with huge parking lots and stroads. Otherwise it can be a lot easier to take a train or metro a couple stops than worry about where to park.
The fact that he played pranks on people to make them think they saw UFOs seems like weak evidence for a long-term commitment to deceiving people about his own experience up to the point of committing perjury, backed up by other members of his squad and when someone else took a video of it after he had landed.
Entelecheia
9mo ago
Yeah, I thought maybe it had something to do with scheduling conflicts so I don’t mean to be too critical of the filmmakers on that. Just ended up being kind of disappointing and felt oddly executed. But I’m really looking forward to Dune and something has to give, I’m sure.
Entelecheia
10mo ago
One of my pet peeves is the way any unfavorable judgment of an aesthetic trend is treated as a consequence of the critic being old. I grew up with these trends and have hated them for my entire life.
Entelecheia
10mo ago
In America, anyway. Tokyo and Vienna are doing just fine.
Entelecheia
10mo ago
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, I’m pretty easy to get along with. I just don’t like driving or long travel times so I tend to choose to avoid it, and don’t have many opportunities to meet people that don’t require that.
Entelecheia
10mo ago
My only other option right now without getting another job would be to move to New York City and that’s off the table for me because of the filth and disorder. So it’s either suburbs, London, or new job.
Entelecheia
10mo ago
Being driven in an uber isn’t comparable to driving. You don’t have to actually drive, or endure the stress and uncertainty of having to find parking in the middle of London.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Cool, would love to hear what you think of it!
Entelecheia
1yr ago
They demurely posit their invisible god
This is redundant; the necessary being cannot be corporeal because what is corporeal can be corrupted, and what is not corporeal cannot be visible.
who isn't really associated with any particular religion
That's a feature, not a bug; everyone, not just people who have encountered a particular religious tradition, can know God.
who doesn't really do anything
In classical theism, God not only does things, but everything that exists at any moment exists only at that moment insofar as God makes it exist, so this is wildly inaccurate.
seemingly motivated more by a desire to at least be treated as Serious People rather than any urge to actually prove that anything in particular exists
The arguments you're talking about were developed throughout the history of philosophy by people who had no particular motivation to appear any way in internet debates thousands of years later.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Not that one, no, but I mean to pick it up at some point.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
In the classical schema, the knowledge of God is presented as the apex of theoretical contemplation, which does not need any external justification but is itself the foundational good of human life. From Aristotle's Protrepticus:
To seek from all knowledge a result other than itself, and to demand that knowledge must be useful, is the act of one completely ignorant of the distance that from the start separates things good from things necessary; they stand at opposite extremes. For of the things without which life is impossible those that are loved for the sake of something else must be called necessities and contributing causes, but those that are loved for themselves even if nothing follows must be called goods in the strict sense. This is not desirable for the sake of that, and that for the sake of something else, and so ad infinitum; there is a stop somewhere. It is completely ridiculous, therefore, to demand from everything some benefit other than the thing itself, and to ask "What then is the gain to us?" and "What is the use?" For in truth, as we maintain, he who asks this is in no way like one who knows the noble and good, or who distinguishes causes from accompanying conditions.
One would see the supreme truth of what we are saying, if someone carried us in thought to the islands of the blest. There there would be need of nothing, no profit from anything; there remain only thought and contemplation, which even now we describe as the free life. If this be true, would not any of us be rightly ashamed if when the chance was given us to live in the islands of the blest, he were by his own fault unable to do so? Not to be despised, therefore, is the reward that knowledge brings to men, nor slight the good that comes from it. For as, according to the wise among the poets, we receive the gifts of justice in Hades, so (it seems) we gain those of wisdom in the islands of the blest.
It is nowise strange, then, if wisdom does not show itself useful or advantageous; we call it not advantageous but good, it should be chosen not for the sake of anything else, but for itself. For as we travel to Olympia for the sake of the spectacle itself, even if nothing were to follow from it (for the spectacle itself is worth more than much wealth), and as we view the Dionysia not in order to gain anything from the actors (indeed we spend money on them), and as there are many other spectacles we should prefer to much wealth, so too the contemplation of the universe is to be honoured above all the things that are thought useful. For surely it cannot be right that we should take great pains to go to see men imitating women and slaves, or fighting and running, just for the sake of the spectacle, and not think it right to view without payment the nature and reality of things.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
I really dislike the First Mover argument since it just pushes back the problem of what comes first. If the universe needs a cause, why doesn't God?
But the arguments explain why the universe needs a cause and God doesn't, so this doesn't seem like a fruitful objection. In particular the basic structure of many cosmological arguments is an inference from contingency to necessity, and the existence of something contingent and actual implies an external reason why it is actual as opposed to not (i.e. a cause), whereas the existence of something necessary does not.
Actually I'm not sure if I've been interpreting this argument correctly up to this point. My objection is to a kind of methodological materialism or ruling out a priori the possibility of knowledge from philosophical methods. I'm not sure that's coherent because of the obvious issue with stating that one knows this. Perhaps one could deny that one knows it but say it is possibly true, but I don't think that makes any sense, because advancing that proposition (p = "I don't know if the scientific method is the only way to knowledge, but it could be true") is effectively asserting knowledge of p, and one does not know p scientifically.
If what @SSCReader or you mean is just that metaphysical materialism may be true - that it may turn out to be the case that materialism is right and we can make philosophical arguments for and against that and evaluate them according to philosophical methods to arrive at knowledge - then I have no objection.
Sounds interesting. For me it's the Mediterranean lifestyle and walkability that I am after. I'm still very junior though so I'll probably need to put in more years before I can realistically start aiming for this.
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