I am assuming you are from Western Europe or Eastern Asia to say this. There are other places where religious movements have gained more momentum while scientific developments have also taken place.

What are you saying leads to pessimism here, the acknowledgement that suffering is inevitable? Because I doubt there's any philosophy in existence that completely denies the existence of suffering at all, and most philosophies are not pessimistic in the sense here, so the acknowledgement definitely doesn't lead to that.

As for philosophies that speak to the suffering of all and not just some, there are a lot that do, but it's mostly just paper thin arguments about why those suffering the most implicitly deserve it because they don't play by society's rules. I suspect speaking about suffering in general is too abstract to really examine those most suffering in society in a way that's meant to be integrated into a larger sociopolitical philosophy.

Seems like their use of "ideal life" is the imagined one free of "loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, and the absurd" whereas your use here is one in which those are well-managed but still present. I see how both could be called ideal lives, but they're not the same in my eyes, or I doubt anybody's really.

So two things. First, the thought of the story of human life being meaningful if the outcome is a just society is a strange one, especially considering the deemphasizing of telos earlier on (focusing on process instead of projects). This is not only because it focuses on the end of a project, obtaining a just society, but because life goes on after that's obtained. There's no end to history, so it can always be changed, and potentially for the worse, for society to become unjust again, and thus the story of human life becoming unmeaningful once again. The only way out of that I see is for humanity to be extinguished on a good note somehow.

The second and more important thing to me is the focus on atelic activities. Like I agree it's obviously better that if we are able to derive meaning/feel good/have fun/be happy/have a good reason to live/live well/etc at least more through the atelic processes than telic ones then that would be fantastic because those are the activities that make up almost all of life. But I don't know how to think of those as the most meaningful for myself and desperately want to. Somebody please help with that lmao

Philosophy is the language practice of shoving isolated and/or collective problems into a memory hole in order to reduce stress on a given individual.

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I very much agree, what is the point of developing "oughts" if not to make existence worth living?

However, this could also lead to pessimistic philosophy like Antinatalism, Efilism, Pro mortalism, Nihilism, etc. Because some may see suffering as something unpreventable, at least for the unlucky ones and believe we "ought" to not exist, so we dont have to suffer due to bad luck.

Its easy for us to say we ought to live with suffering when we are not the ones that end up on the extreme end of the suffering spectrum, just like how democracy may vote for things that are good for the majority but terrible for the minority.

Personally, I have yet found a philosophy that could speak for both the majority and the minority with regard to suffering. Should we continue the species knowing that some will always have terrible lives not worth living? Should we end the entire species because of some victims of terrible lives? We dont have a clear cut philosophical answer, as far as I know.

One for all or all for one?

I've never heard of anyone saying "The real practical value of philosophy comes through focusing on the ‘ideal’ life"

Either way.. doesn't "helping us deal with life’s inevitable suffering" and "navigating loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, & the absurd" practically result in some form of "ideal" life?

It's like saying "The purpose of breathing isn't to keep us alive, it's to pass air to the lungs, provide the body with oxygen, and remove carbon dioxide."

As soon as it wants to decline, someone comes to media and says "why don't we have representative of those fundamentalists in media?" You know ? The wok culture. And you see them appear and then gradually take control.of narratives.

Abstract

In this in-depth interview, MIT philosopher professor Kieran Setiya argues philosophy is at its most effective when it engages with a simple fact: life is hard. He believes that, rather than strive and yearn for an elusive ‘best life’, we should think instead about how to live well. Over the course of the discussion, Kieran demonstrates how it is the process of philosophical contemplation, not just the content of it, that can help us to navigate adversity. The interview covers grief, injustice, failure, the meaning of life, and explores the limitations of ‘ideal theory’, Stoicism, and materialistic conceptions of success.

Because politicians cannot control intellectual societies. So they use media to make people dumb. When they are dumb they hang on anything to answer their problems and appease their anxieties. This is a vicious cycle.

Perfection is the enemy of good. :)

Oohhh, I might have found a new blog to follow!

Yeah, the religion is getting more powerful where society gets more technologized. What? On what planet are you living?

To me this illustrates the hard problem of consciousness. It’s not smart systems that we can’t create, but as a coder, how could i write something that feels? It’s not possible. I could write something that mimics feeling, but there is no innate feeling in the code we write. Maybe panpsychists would disagree, but even then we’re creating artificial life- making the substrate conscious of its feelings. It would not be part of the code, but part of the physical world. This is part of what makes Analytic Idealism an appealing explanatory metaphysics for me.

you can create a computer out of the dumbest possible material - see the novel Three Body Problem or XKCD where he builds a computer out of rocks. how you get from there to feeling seems too great a leap.

Prison: punishment or rehabilitation, Should someone pay their entire lives for a crime.

A news segment got me thinking about this and I’m curious what other perspectives are.

The article was about a teenage boy who murdered a teenage girl via strangulation. Because he was a minor at the time in my country you can’t release their name. He’s finished his sentence and is due to be released soon and the victim’s family want laws changed to be able to publicity name and shame him. They want to do this for “the safety of the public”.

I’ve seen Law and Order SVU episodes on a similar issue. In regards to rapists who finish their sentences. As weird as it sounds they normally focus on for lack of a better phrase run of mill offenders. Like I know these are horrible crimes but they aren’t Jeffery Dahmer or Dennis Rader level horrible.

And I’m conflicted on the issue.

On one hand I understand the idea. These people committed rape/murder which is awful and I wouldn’t want to live near them either. And the families/victims want them to suffer, I get that sentiment.

But if we give people sentences that they can finished/served even without parole. Shouldn’t we focus on rehabilitation first and punishment second? To make sure society is safe with them out? This guy, the one that’s a teenager, killed someone and he’s done his time shouldn’t we leave him alone and allow him to reintegrate into society? Or should we sentence all offenders like him to remain in prison their entire lives? I also feel like if we continue to name, shame and make this ex prisoners lives miserable their just going to commit another offence bring more pain into the world. And we would have been better off having them rot in prison.

What are your thoughts?

I think most of these comments are understating the emotions involved. Some very significant portions of many populations have strong emotional ties to their Gods, or their science. It isn't difficult to show some imperfections in every religion I am familiar with, but remember that science gets things wrong too. Anyone who wants to see either one as fundamentally flawed has more than adequate material to reach their desired conclusion.
Even if you manage to demonstrate that evolution makes Gods unnecessary, you would still have to show Gods don't exist to actually destroy religion. You are also going to have to teach advanced science to the masses before they understand why it contradicts their religion. Many people are experts in neither and see science and religion as compatible.

There are good reasons why all ancient civilizations had a religion. Uniting a population and imposing a 'moral code' was very beneficial to the wellbeing of the group.

The question I would pose is, is it still necessary for religion to be the basis for uniting people?

I would say it is more cultural than political. While religion is used to control the masses in many areas, that would not explain the current uprisings against the religious leaders in Iran. In that specific case, the population is not quite so religious as advertised and the corruption/brutality of the government has brought unrest.

The USA is another interesting case. The religion embracing conservatives are willing to accept a leader who is by no means a moral Christian in the hopes of stopping the progressive changes the country has seen in the past 2 generations.

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Well, that's Kierkegaard's position - when you're presented with the choice between selfish hedonism, reason, and the spiritual life, we're given a contextless question with no way of building context or understanding why we have to make a choice without relying on one of the above categories to build context.

Instead of viewing the spiritual life as ideological, we might see it as submissive in the face of overwhelming knowledge - we are finite and in the face of the infinite, so we can't possibly begin to create justification within our finite spheres of understanding. See the contrast between Kierkegaard's treatment of the story of Abraham and Isaac and Kant's - if we side with Kant (the ethical/reasonable thinker), we basically deform the infinite into a greater (but imperfect) version of ourselves.

So, although ideology definitely plays a part, I see the spiritual thinker as someone who admits they don't understand and can't understand something because they are limited by their finite nature. You might also think about Lovecraft here - on being confronted with otherworldly horrors or four-sided triangles, how can we begin to create explanations for something that lies outside of our abilities to reason about?

Although it sounds like crackpot nonsense at first, the bigger question really comes down to whether the limits of our language and understanding as the limits of our world are the limits of the world. If we're not careful, we're at risk of claiming beyond what we can.

For me, religion or belief in a higher being promotes accountability. Example. You do bad, there is punishment. You do good, there is reward. Also the golden rule.

Science without accountability probably gave us the errs of Wuhan covid and the errs of how to treat it and how we can recover everything else.

Science is a method and conclusions from that method must be questioned. So we can get the best from it.

That's why polio vaccines are good. That's why exercise is good.

My point is there shouldn't be an expert in science. Because everything can be tested.

At the same time if religion isn't about accountability, if it does not make you a better person or helps you think; it's not religious or religion but a cult not for the betterment of man.

> And beside, it's not like any other form of knowledge seeking will ever bring you truth either. Most of them can't even describe the rules of this simulation.

That is because the religious truth doesn't need to deal with the rules of the simulation. It can go meta of it. For example, the nature of how I should think and live are the same regardless of the scenario and the simulation. Virtue, for example, is universal and would be universal in all planes of existence, be them simulated planes or non-simulated planes. The rules of the simulation grant control of the environment, but have nothing to do with the intrinsic being-ness of our psychological nature, or at least not directly. No simulation provides in itself existential orientation, which is what religions aim to provide.

As for whether truth-seeking is absurd or not, without truth that becomes irrational statement. You are claiming that to be true("it is true that truth-seeking is a waste of time"). But there are different kinds of truth and scopes of truth. I do not require an absolute truth because I am not an absolute entity.