2 Questions About Logical Inconsistency & Morality

[BrianBlackwell]

I was under the impression that you liked him more than his ideas. That you weren't quoting him because he's a credible source on a specific topic, but because he's a guy you like. Glad to know this is not the case. It's easier to dicuss ideas rather than people.

Oh, don't revise your impression, you were right the first time -- McKenna's not a credible source on any topic. Hahahaha. I'm half joking with this; the man is more intelligent, eloquent, curious, respectable, passionate and experienced than many who have been quoted far more often. He's also incredibly grounded, considering the "far-out" nature of the topic he usually concerns himself with.

The reason I make the joke is because he does not make assertions from a position of authority, but rather offers suggestions, ponderings, and far more questions than answers. He would be the first to tell you that you shouldn't take his word for anything, but to look into it for yourself. For that reason, I think it would be hard to get a foothold for debunking him.

That being said, he does have a firm grasp on the topics he's discussing, and to hear him speak is often an experience of intellectual poetry, without any of the pretense. He's one of a kind, to be sure, and he has his following, but he's nowhere near assertive enough to inspire a cult. Not to mention, he's dead, which would defeat the purpose of organizing a cult, seeing as how he can't take advantage of the vulnerable young women

[BrianBlackwell]

Brim, I believe this is the backbone of your position - the materialist worldview. For you, something must be "tested", "experimented" or require a "method" for it to (objectively) exist.

And wouldn't the world be a more peaceful place if everybody saw it that way? Nobody would fight over religion, fueled by blind faith.

...people need to remain grounded by reality to avoid committing atrocities.

I think the problem you're describing is not actually a case of replacing subjectivity for objectivity, but rather mistaking subjectivity for objectivity. It's the belief in objectivity that's actually the root of the problem -- they think their version of their religion is objectively true.

It's always the belief that one is justified by objective truth that's at the root of all ideological absurdities, if you examine it closely. This includes the materialists' knee-jerk dismissal of the utterly ubiquitous spiritual impulse exhibited by nearly all peoples the world over, throughout the entire course of history, independent of cross-cultural contact.

This is why I describe the acknowledgement of utter subjectivity as a position of humility. I have my spiritual beliefs, but I know that I do not know them to be true with objective certainty, so how could I assert them to another, no less kill them over it? I have been disarmed by a lack of logical justification. Once again, you have to give a sh*t about logical justification for this to be effective, but that goes for anything -- a nutjob will always just do whatever he wants, so all appeals to logic will fall on deaf ears.

[brimstoneSalad]

I think the problem you're describing is not actually a case of replacing subjectivity for objectivity, but rather mistaking subjectivity for objectivity. It's the belief in objectivity that's actually the root of the problem -- they think their version of their religion is objectively true.

And being able to prove them objectively false is far more useful than convincing them those beliefs are subjective truth for them but still as valid for guiding their behaviors as anything else.

Nothing stops a suicide bomber from killing over something he knows is faith and does not claim to be objective fact.

It's always the belief that one is justified by objective truth that's at the root of all ideological absurdities,

Carnism is an ideological absurdity, so is rejecting objective reality.

if you examine it closely. This includes the materialists' knee-jerk dismissal of the utterly ubiquitous spiritual impulse exhibited by nearly all peoples the world over, throughout the entire course of history, independent of cross-cultural contact.

I don't see any knee-jerk dismissal. There is study of spiritual experience.

I have my spiritual beliefs, but I know that I do not know them to be true with objective certainty, so how could I assert them to another, no less kill them over it?

You kill over them every day when you put meat on your plate and justify that with your subjective beliefs.

Show me how you convince somebody to stop doing that with appeals to subjective values. How could I convince you?

I have been disarmed by a lack of logical justification.

You might have an argument if you were vegan.

a nutjob will always just do whatever he wants, so all appeals to logic will fall on deaf ears.

What are you saying here?

Yes, a tiny percentage of psychopaths and crazy people will do as they wish. We can institutionalize them so they won't hurt others.
The problem is normal, average people doing evil from false beliefs, whether that's extremist Islam or Carnism. Your approach does nothing to dull that. If your own behavior is any indication, it encourages you to ignore the harm you do to others.

[BrianBlackwell]

Well, again, the objectivity of this ethics (or ethics in general) has not been established, so you and I are in the same boat. You're saying that because I have a subjectively-derived ethical code, that is why I can kill via carnism with no remorse, whereas you are bound by the objective nature of veganism (I'm using "bound" loosely here).

I'm sure I don't have to refer you to George Carlin's spot about the "sanctity of life" for an explanation of how arbitrary the idea actually is. Again, a loose usage -- Arbitrary in the sense that it's not objective; I understand all the reasonsing that supports the position.

By the nutjobs comment I just mean that people who are willing to blow themselves up are difficult tonreason with.

Call it archaic or unnecessary, but carnism is not intellectual absurdity. It's the way humans were able to survive until the age of agriculture, which is a hell of a long time. And again, the fact that animals don't want to die implies absolutely nothing about how humans "should" behave, unless you first buy in to the premise via preference. This ethic is not a fact, it's an opinion, no matter how well thought-out.

I have not rejected objective reality, I have said that there isn't the slightest shred of evidence to suggest it. This is extremely prudent, more skeptical than science itself, and thus, not intellectual absurdity.

Some of your responses are agenda-laden and disingenuous. A study by some into spirituality does not negate the fact that almost every materialist I've spoken with has a "flying spaghetti monster" loaded in the chamber, ready to fire. Don't nit-pick things you know are largely accurate; I'm not going to waste time with a million qualifications when we both know what I mean.

This also applies to twisting my statement about "not killing another" over my subjective beliefs. This implies murder, not killing for food, and it implies people, not animals. Within the context of the statement, you know this, and you're just breaking balls by pivoting to a cheap shot.

How can you convince me? I don't know because there are so many variables in the absence of an objective standard. The same way you'd convince anyone of anything, I guess -- tell them your story and get lucky.

I have said ethics is rooted in conscience, which is rooted in beliefs. I don't believe a man kills himself and others based on faith. You may call it faith, but to him, it's knowledge. He is 100% certain his God is objectively real (of course he does not actually have certainty, but he thinks he does). If you removed that certainty, I believe many would not do it, or many other horrible things. But this is just a notion I have based on what I see in myself and others.

[DarlBundren]

That being said, he does have a firm grasp on the topics he's discussing, and to hear him speak is often an experience of intellectual poetry, without any of the pretense

Anything in particular you would recommend?

[NonZeroSum]

I have my spiritual beliefs, but I know that I do not know them to be true with objective certainty, so how could I assert them to another, no less kill them over it?

You kill over them every day when you put meat on your plate and justify that with your subjective beliefs.

This also applies to twisting my statement about "not killing another" over my subjective beliefs. This implies murder, not killing for food, and it implies people, not animals. Within the context of the statement, you know this, and you're just breaking balls by pivoting to a cheap shot.

You made an appeal to a harmonious peacefulness that exists when two people acknowledge that they're operating on the level of ideology and shouldn't kill one another over it. It is not a twisting of your words to explain how that isn't satisfactory when one party is still engaged in killing. I would add it's killing for taste not food, as food is plentiful, and drawing an arbitrary distinction between species when both have the capacity to suffer, and both are unnecessary.

You could get yourself to start relating to pigs or chickens the same way you do to dogs just by spending enough time around them, there is bad faith involved when you block that out of your mind, and refuse to care about it on the level you would treat another dog or human of the same intelligence or sentience.

the man is more intelligent, eloquent, curious, respectable, passionate . . .I think it would be hard to get a foothold for debunking him.

So unfalsifiable... That's a problem. We should at the very least be able to determine whether the actions it affected in it's subscribers to take were good effective ones. Look I fully understand what you're saying with this humans operate on a base subjectivist level with an absurdly chaotic relative universe, we all do. There are existentialists who say the person who channels their inner beast and wills it to power will out compete the rest and that will be the dominant ideology of the day, so to only eat plants is a cop out and you're only hurting yourself and no hope of changing the world, yada yada, it's all macho crap to me, people should be able to decide whatever community they want to live in and find joy in it, and their behavior will be shaped by what actions they take to facilitate that coming about. Then there are liberationist existentialists, no gods no masters mentality, where you take all the universal principles of loving your neighbor not just how you would want to be treated but how they would too (radical ay?), all practical provisions aside, and you subscribe to those objectives together, you just say on a tiny scale we might have this rhyzomatic, informal decentralized knowing what is best for one another thing worked out, we'll come up with an experimental ethics on top of the basics, and we'll all have a pow wow every month and ask each other how it's going, what we might need from each other, and thus spoke Zarathustra, or was it the Quakers, no maybe the Paris commune. There you go was that McKenna speak enough for you? Aha, universal ethics are simply universal standards people collectively agree to sign up to bring about good consequences. I hope you'll get your head out your solipsist ass (no offense!) and start participating. To the degree that it's not practical to act as if the world is always going to end tomorrow, and we're interacting with objective facts, we can come to an objective consensus about what is mathematically the best means of achieving good ends for everyone.

[AMP3083]

Nice, Zero. But not quite. It's like Bruce Li movies are fun to watch and he can kinda pull it off but he ain't the real thing. Teasin'. You can spit some game though. Good job!

Terence (or should I say the mushroom, considering that's where he claims to have received the message) might still be right though - nobody knows jack shit, including here in this thread. Maybe he also means that everything is bullshit, I don't know, but if not, then I will make that assertion right now. All his stories about psychedelic experiences are fun to listen to, but to me they're just stories, nothing more. They would be more fun to listen to if I could relate to them. I'd like to see if psychedelics can verify this funny notion that everything is/might be bullshit. If not, regardless, at least I'd have a story to tell and might even relate it with McKenna's stories and other people who had similar experiences.

I think this guy found out the hard way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byjOe4PViT8 - "Somethin' ain't right." Yeah, no shit.

Brian, you probably don't remember saying this in one of your past convos, but I think it's fair to add it here for what its worth:
"I'm readily admitting to knowing almost nothing, rather than being so foolishly bold in my ignorance by presuming to tell others that they are "wrong" when I can't even describe what right and wrong are."

Brim, I saw your comment in the TM thread started by Zero. Yeah man, McKenna could be bullshitting for all we know, but that doesn't change the fact for me that he's a fascinating fella' to listen to. I don't know which speakers on YouTube you prefer, but I'll stick with the likes of McKenna. I like his bullshit. (no sarcasm)

Ideas Get Me High
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBTJYfBnUBU

Don't Believe Anything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW1raoSW_7k

This Is What Terence McKenna Was All About
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8Dg-QVWxo

"Do not believe anything; not what the government scientists say, not your local bishop, politician, guru, even anything I say; the last thing we need is a Terence McKenna cult. It's not a cult. ... It's not that I want you to join me in believing in this. It's that this is so outlandish that join me as a scientist would join a research team and lets cut it to pieces, and lets show that it was a misunderstanding of misinformation theory, coupled with bad mathematics, spliced onto a weak ontology or something like that."

[NonZeroSum]

It's not that I want you to join me in believing in this. It's that this is so outlandish that join me as a scientist would join a research team and lets cut it to pieces, and lets show that it was a misunderstanding of misinformation theory, coupled with bad mathematics, spliced onto a weak ontology or something like that."

All his stories about psychedelic experiences are fun to listen to, but to me they're just stories, nothing more. They would be more fun to listen to if I could relate to them. I'd like to see if psychedelics can verify this funny notion that everything is/might be bullshit. If not, regardless, at least I'd have a story to tell and might even relate it with McKenna's stories and other people who had similar experiences.

These two assertions are problems, because they are a call to ignorance and you both just keep repeating it's unfalsifiable in different ways, which also means unprovable.

This implies murder, not killing for food, and it implies people, not animals.

AskYourselfs clarification of his NamethatTrait arguement is quite cogent:

Let's be perfectly clear, you either hold one of the following two positions or an inconsistent hybrid of the two. Either you hold that:

a) Moral gradation does not require justification.

In which case you have no argument against the Holocaust because well Jews have lower moral value and we don't need to justify this moral gradation.

or

b) you hold the position that moral gradation does require justification

In which case you can't deploy a justification in one context and reject it in another, that is a double standard.

If you want to get around the double standard there are two ways to do this:

a) you could drop the argument and come up with another argument that does work in both contexts

or

b) you could keep the initial argument but you can spell out whatever differences exist between the two contexts, which if removed from the context that possesses them or if added to the context that lacks them would render the argument valid in either context.

Otherwise you're saying that an argument is sometimes true and sometimes false without explaining why? That is a contradiction.

- https://youtu.be/bsvhzlc1PUk?t=2m31s

[DarlBundren]

Nobody knows jack shit, including here in this thread.

There are people who have spent all their life researching and finding information about the universe and, yes, they know their shit. Would you tell your doctor that ' he/she is as clueless as the next guy' if he/she prescribed you something?

Hard skepticism has no answers because it poses no questions. For something to be worth dealing with we should at least imagine a possible answer. If we cannot even imagine an answer, your words may be arranged in an interrogative form, but you're not really asking anything at all. Therefore, it's a waste of time.

Objective means 'not influenced by personal feelings'. Answers can be more or less reliable – you never have complete confidence. That doesn't mean that we should throw everything out of the window and start believing that 'crystals are conduits of magical energies' is as plausible an assertion as 'aspirins cure headaches'. We develop confidence from experience, intuition, experiment and so on. In short, what we call the scientific method. And the scientific method is simply the most effective way we have to avoid being biased. The falsifiability of scientific hypothesis, the fact that what we know may turn out to be false, is a strength not a weakness.

This means, as I've already said, that relying on it is also the most ethical option we have. 'Liking bullshit' is not. You can keep on wondering if we are all just rats in a maze if you like (westworld was pretty cool), but in the meantime, if you care about being a good person, you should choose what is most probable to be true. Billions of animals are killed for food every year: this is a fact. You can help to avoid this by going vegan/vegetarian/reducitarian: another fact.

Ultimately, this should be common sense. There are no hard skeptics in this world – they would not survive for two minutes if they were. We are all forced to make predictions and to work on incomplete data, and every time you say something like ' the world will end in 2012 because the Mayan Long Count calendar says so' you are making a statement that can be proven false. A perfect example of Karl Popper's basic scientific principle, a method he developed to discern between science and pseudoscience.

[BrianBlackwell]

Anything in particular you would recommend?

Unfortunately not... I've listened to so many of his talks, i can't remember what I heard where. But on YouTube there's a ton of videos, and they usually have the topic in their title, so you can just choose what's interesting. This guy's channel will spare you the indignity of having to hear bombastic and inane advertisements in the middle of a reflective and relaxing journey of mind:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF2_XJffJwfmcAZ-Avmg3fA