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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


				

User ID: 342

Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

					

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


					

User ID: 342

the higher level stuff doesn’t seem that useful to me.

Sex isn’t very useful either most of the time, but that doesn’t diminish the appeal.

Hlynka reminded me that there is no solution, that there is no plan, that we are not in control of the world; all we control is ourselves; we make our choices and live with the consequences.

I'm in complete agreement on this point!

Anyway, I think one of the crucial issues is that, as I raised at the end of the previous thread, "we know how to solve all our problems" isn't a good criteria for partitioning equivalence classes of political ideologies. As an epistemic attitude, it can be mixed and matched with multiple different ideologies.

Suppose we have three different people:

  • #1 is a Marxist who thinks we know how to solve all our problems. He unabashedly thinks that the proletarian revolution will usher in a utopia.

  • #2 is a standard American libertarian who also thinks we know how to solve all our problems. Say the story is something like, free market democratic capitalism is the only ideology that will engender the type of scientific research and economic growth we need to develop ASI. And once we have ASI we'll have a utopia.

  • #3 is a standard American libertarian who is virtually identical to #2 on all substantive policy issues, except that he doesn't think we know how to solve all our problems. He doesn't think libertarianism will lead to a utopia, but he believes in it and advocates for it anyway, even though he acknowledges that the ultimate outcome of all our political actions is always uncertain.

So, who is identical with who? And who's the odd man out here?

Based on the importance you assign to the criteria of "knowing how to solve all our problems", it seems like you'd be forced to say that #1 and #2 are the same, and #3 is different. But this just seems wrong. The more natural classification is that the two libertarians are the same (and indeed, getting hung up on whether libertarianism can lead to a utopia or not would be a narcissism of small differences), and the Marxist is different.

I'm also skeptical that, if given the choice between living in a Stalinist regime ruled by #1, or a somewhat more libertarian version of 2024 America with #2 as the four year duly elected president, you would say "it doesn't matter to me, they both think we know how to solve all our problems, so I have no preference for one country over the other".

What are your standards for unclear writing??

Hegel can be unclear at times:

In self-sublating real possibility, it is a twofold that is now sublated; for this possibility is itself the twofold of actuality and possibility. The actuality is formal, or is a concrete existence which appeared to subsist immediately, and through its sublating becomes reflected being, the moment of an other, and thus comes in possession of the in-itself. That concrete existence was also determined as possibility or as the in-itself, but of an other. As it sublates itself, this in-itself of the other is also sublated and passes over into actuality. – This movement of self-sublating real possibility thus produces the same moments that are already present, but each as it comes to be out of the other; in this negation, therefore, the possibility is also not a transition but a self-rejoining. – In formal possibility, if something was possible, then an other than it, not itself, was also possible. Real possibility no longer has such an other over against it, for it is real in so far as it is itself also actuality. Therefore, as its immediate concrete existence, the circle of conditions, sublates itself, it makes itself into the in-itselfness which it already is, namely the in-itself of an other. And conversely, since its moment of in-itselfness thereby sublates itself at the same time, it becomes actuality, hence the moment which it likewise already is. – What disappears is consequently this, that actuality was determined as the possibility or the in-itself of an other, and, conversely, the possibility as an actuality which is not that of which it is the possibility.

The negation of real possibility is thus its self-identity; inasmuch as in its sublating it is thus within itself the recoiling of this sublating, it is real necessity.