I don't know if I failed the class or not yet, we'll find out.

EDIT - Your stupid message board took out my line breaks and paragraph indents. I hope you're happy.

Here Goes Nothingness
What I say here has been said before by others in better words and has probably already been thoroughly refuted by some bureaucrat with an overly large vocabulary and a will to destroy dreams. Kant says that the only way metaphysics are possible is through the system he proposes and he leaves leeway saying that you must destroy his thought or come through it if you ever hope to go into the future of the mind. He was of course destroyed several times over and passed through just as many times I'm sure. The full extent to which he has been used and abused is outside of my reading range currently, I will assume he is horrendously outdated by modern standards of excellence, but still admired for how thorough and beautiful his system is. I will try to use as few passages as I can from him so that others who read this don't require a knowledge of the book to understand the meaning of this paper. Kant made the same mistake most everyone besides Astrophysicists and Science Fiction writers make, that is he doesn't take into full account how brilliant the generations afterwards will be. Sure, there will be billions of men who come after us who are complete and total jack-asses by most meanings of the word but there will be enough men(and women of course) amongst them to make great leaps forward.
“Yet the differences are internal as the senses teach, for, notwithstanding their equality and similarity, the left hand cannot be enclosed in the same bounds as the right one (they are not congruent); the glove of one hand cannot be used for another.â€

When you said Jesse Jackson, did you mean Johnny Cochrane? I'd subtract 5 points for that blunder.

A little run on but insightful. A-

I'm holding back from giving you a B even though your comment that the lives that we've tasted is 'better' and that we shouldn't go back (to be being wild animals). That seems to be locked into an unimaginative bias. Do you really know that this life is 'better' than living in the wild unless you are using non-wild criteria to judge it (i.e. civilization as the standard)?

However, I do agree that truth is relative to the infinite in a sense and that progression (what you would deem a problem) is based on a 'relatively' fixed starting point. the way that I treat it is that truth lies in a modal domain which is designated for apparently ulitmately arbitrary motivations (if you go back far enough) but which have significant local meaning.

The thing is, it seemed as though somewhere you were saying that several truths couldn't be equivalent to a single truth. Even if we were referring to the case where we are not talking about a summation of truths (from several different particular perspectives) into a single universal perspective, an imaginative application of modal logic allows for completely contradictory truths to exist simultaneously in the same domain so long as the domain is relatively irrational, traditionally illogical, and/or absurd. In other words it may still exist, you just can't get to it through reason, if at all.

Oh yeah, minus 1 point for saying 'we' lightly with respect to 'we philosophers'. You are a philosopher according to me. Now what does that matter I don't know, but if you do not want to be a lonely philospoher, than have some social confidence with who you are, and admit it...or not.

Yes, I did mean Johhny Cochran, and thank you for all that. I've lived on farms and I've been through times when the only food we got was what we could kill on our 60 acres and it's a terrible way to live. We've perverted the natural environment so much it'd be very hard to go back to the way we were, Vegetarians certainly wouldn't survive and while I'm sure I could bring myself to kill more for food, I don't want to. A summation of truths can never be the one single truth that so many look for but I suppose in definition they are slightly that, but I just don't think of them as such in my mind. Thank you again for reading and commenting.

You're welcome.

I do agree that we kind of 'can't' go back to being wild. But then again maybe some of us could while the others die out. It wouldn't be for everyone.

I was probably forcing the issue of what makes for a 'better' life, but with respect to what you were saying, I was trying to caution against the idea that there is some path or direction of progress that we should be doing as humans to allow for the freedom to realize that it might be such that faith in the idea of civilization has become so restrictive that our spirits are actually worse off than they could be if we were less pro-civil or more pro-wild.

You'd be surprised how wild we can be if all our modern advances were brought to a standstill.

Anarachy will always be a possibility, but that's not what I mean. We can't go back to the whole hunter/gatherer society or hell even the farming society really. We're stuck in the post-developmental world we're in, sure we can be wild, but not quite the wild I'm referring to.

And I give you this to humor you.

Hey that comic is awesome!

Admit it. It's better but we are just scared to go there.

I know, the comic doesn't show when warring offices come attack or some outbreak of disease.

Actually the comic goes too far. The best world is exemplified in the panel above the break room and the break room panel itself. They exemplifiy people being free to be themselves (legally within the population) without having to worry about other people's social baggage.

"Vegetarians certainly wouldn't survive"

So, in this phantom world you aborted from, there are no plants?

And really, sunflowers in the urinal trumps, Bo.

"We are victims of our own success."

Biologically, many 'victims' of their own success die out when the population gets too big.

It is inevitable for all of us, not just the vegetarians.

you know, i read once that Philosophy is the academic discipline with the most jokes. it really is; so much of it is hilarious, or amusing, if only vaguely. for all sorts of reasons. or i find it so.

the chief export of a philosophy department is used paper.

none of the philosophers i know who earn a salary are islands. maybe they're a different type of philosopher to you, it'd make lots of sense. what's your chief export? =D


... i can't say i read it too religiously, skimmed and reskimmed about fits it. and ofc i'm a bit drunk. it seemed... hehe... real. you know, like the real thoughts of a real person. which in a way is nice, i'm sort of glad you posted it.

you're as bad at structure as i am, i suspect. though seeing it without paragraphing makes it look more messy than it is, perhaps.

Most vegetarians get the essential vitamins and minerals they need from things specifically manufactured for them, look up the essential amino acids like L-Lysine and the such. Vegetarians would not survive longer than 50 years or so if we reverted to an anarchic society, I'm sorry, we've just built the world that way.

We are omnivores for a reason, I'm not fully sure for the reason, but I think there is one.



Sometimes, yes. It doesn't have to be this way, we just seemed to have duped ourselves into it.



"God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.â€

Every single essential vitamin or mineral which is found in animals is to be found in the soil, is found in the plants, which are eaten by animals.
There were vegetarians long before there were manufactured vegetarian goods; for instance, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a tract on the natural diet approximately 190 years ago, referencing the various instances of its practice throughout history.
And, really, vegetarians would die out only inasmuch as all others dependent on third parties for their own self-preservation would die out.

It will be a lot harder to transfer to this new system for those in a metropolitan locale which is our main hubs of collection. Out of the few who do transition well the true omnivores would be the most likely to survive as they could quickly eat a variety of whatever they can get their hands on in order to replenish the body just right. I mean, if you're non-combative peaceful ties with nature's kingdom continue even once we become a part of its machine again, more power to you. I just think this "mercy" we give to animals is a side affect of modern society. For better or worse, it wasn't around before we had the money/technology to support this habit. EVERYBODY ate meat, whether they wanted to or not, they just knew they had to.

When civilized people crash their airplane in the freezing cold Andes, they eat other humans. When they have alternatives they do not.

When civilized people are poor and only meat is available everybody eats meat.

When they have other alternatives, these civil people ...?

I'm sure that quite a few 'vegetarians' would come around eventually as they all have their own reasons for not eating meat. My sister Nicole for example, she says the only reason that she is a vegetarian is because of how the animals are treated in the food industry.

If we were suddenly blasted back to the dark ages, I'm sure that the food industry's suffering would die as well. Now if this is the case, and we go back to 'hunting and gathering', then I'm sure mass animal suffering would no longer be.

These new circumstances would effect the whole reason why some/most vegetarians would have chosen this diet in the first place. As for the people with their other reasons....I don't really know what would happen....slow, agonizing death?

"God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.â€

"I mean, if you're non-combative peaceful ties with nature's kingdom continue even once we become a part of its machine again, more power to you. I just think this "mercy" we give to animals is a side affect of modern society. For better or worse, it wasn't around before we had the money/technology to support this habit. EVERYBODY ate meat, whether they wanted to or not, they just knew they had to."

That is a really strange paragraph.
In any case, it makes too many assumptions for me to successfully uphold a dialogue with it.

But, on another note, as we're all apparently quoting at each other - "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange and mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun-flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke."

Something like that. From the chapter about the hyena in the book about the whale.