Feel free to message me.

As my first post on this community, and my first post on Reddit in general, I 'd just like to say this is hilarious.

On a serious note, I have found my philosophy to be nothing but a burden. I hope to find some open people willing to discuss new ideas with a fool (me) who is willing to learn.

What is a freelance philosopher, and where does one apply!

(Asking for a friend)

Though, I think Neitzche wanted the lack of god to be replaced with humanity striving to build themselves into the ideal species. I'm sure eugenics was born in that thought space. Not what I think he was going for, but his sister was a real piece of work and decided the Nazis would benefit immensely from a cruelly twisted and completely misunderstood philosophical thought process. If she hadn't misinterpreted his thoughts regarding the Ubermensch deliberately, who knows what could have been different.

Did Hedonism grow out of the Neitzchean ideal of god being dead and us necessarily having to fill that lack of purpose or sense of direction with distraction to minimize the pains of being alive?

I hope you're still around. I wanted to continue our discussion.

I don't think I want to get into Free Will issues right now, unless that is important to you. May I ask you the following question.

Image the following two views:

A. There is nothing over and above the neural description of what it going on when you hold a value.

B. The neural description is all well and good. What matters is that it expresses a linguistic assertion of a value. That value can be justified by some means (disjunction of facts, reason-logic, some higher reality)

I think both you and I hold A. However, I acknowledge that there are people who believe B. My choice of A is a philosophical position about justification of assertions.

Is your position:

1. Agree
2. B is not even a position, therefore there is only A. Therefore there is no evaluation to be made between A and B.
3. Something else.

One thing they kinda touch on and move past is that the "hoop jumping" doesn't necessarily find the best candidate, only the one that really wants the job, which could be a relatively poor candidate but just one willing to put in the work.

That is to say, you could have a candidate, who simply doesn't have a job and is throwing applications out there to see what traction they can get. That candidate might actually be the optimal candidate, smart, fast learner, great at adaptation, and very charming. But since they might not have put as much effort I to your application you miss out on the opportunity for that person because some other person, who is less qualified spent more time padding their resume.

From an outside perspective an employer selecting for an applicant that that puts more work into the application produces very little in terms of desirable qualities, you don't know if they are a fast worker only that their resume is marginally better than someone who may have put half as much work into their resume. You only know that they are capable of producing quality material without any reference to how much time or effort it took them, which is something you need to know if you're looking for a worker who needs to produce things on a timetable.

Consider an applicant to some colleges. You have a really smart kid, whip smart, ability to make interdisciplinary connections that would be an absolute boon for your any school, great social ability and passion for multiple subjects. They decide to apply to a lot of schools, from the very top to the very bottom. The amount of work they put into their application is relative to how much they want to attend that school.

The top schools pass on them, they put maximum effort into their application but other just put more. Maybe they had the resources to hire a consultant to do their application, they padded it with things they knew the college was looking for, maybe they are a legacy. At any rate the excellent applicant just didn't make the threshold. This could chain all the way down to the lower end schools. Constantly putting in not enough effort to make it into any school even though they are a perfect applicant for all schools and too good of an applicant for the mid and lower end schools.

The best applicant gets no offers and the lowest and mid range schools lose our on an applicant that is probably one of the better applicants they could have hoped for.

Probably the truest thing he says is basically because the employer is lazy, they are offloading the effort to find an employee to a system they can tell their boss has some relevance to quality but once you unpack the system it doesn't do anything but find the person most desperate for this particular job, which could in some cases be someone under qualified, and it could pass on people who are more than qualified and probably rarely finds the most optimal employee.

Not cognitive science per se (but any critique of neuroscience will have ramifications for cognitive science too), but Bennett's and Hacker's Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience is a rather scathing review of the conceptual foundation of neuroscience.

PMS Hacker (one of the premier contemporary Wittgensteinians) isn't much of a fan of contemporary neuroscience in general, see for example here.

I would recommend the Ominous Parallels or the DIM Hypothesis by Leonard Peikoff for cultural analysis. Both are very accessible.

I have no expertise in mental health, so I'm going to leave that part aside other than to say talking to therapists seems like the right approach.

Just in terms of the philosophical issue, what do you take determinism to be and what is the conundrum?

I have been told that The Egg was/is plagiarised by the original author u/Chiyote on their work Infinite Reincarnation. After reading their original work, I will then read your piece. Thank you for sharing.

Here's an animated video of the egg that I love

https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI

There is a dialogue in there where this theory is compared to Hinduism because of the reincarnation aspect. I also wrote about my thoughts on The Egg if you're interested. It's one of my fav narratives.

I think you might be able to find some good opposition to this idea in Kant's Categorical Imperative. I learned it a while ago but I can try to summarize it. Basically, when looking for moral laws or "rules" he says that you should never act in a way that you wouldn't wish to become a universal law. When you look at it that way, some moral standards come about naturally in my opinion. For example, we shouldn't kill each other because in a world where killing was morally allowed, we as humans wouldn't be able to flourish. There were times in the past when this was the case; when we killed anyone who was opposed to us and brute power became the law of the land. I don't think that kind of world, however "natural", is better or more virtuous. There definitely are some immoral opportunities that are possible uniquely because of civilization but the same applies to the "natural world" and animals.

I'm not sure what to think about hedonism. If we were to all be hedonists, the world would be selfish and unconstructive. Biologically it makes perfect sense to chase the dragon of happiness, but I think we are built for more. That more, is others. Utilitarianism makes much more sense to my small mind than hedonism.

One small critique:

>Of course, everyone spending a few extra hours on applications is not so bad. Except that the same incentive structure iterates. Everyone has reason to spend ten hours polishing, now fifteen hours polishing. Everyone has reason to ask friends to look over their materials, now everyone has reason to hire a job application consultant. Every applicant is stuck in an arms race with every other, but this arms race does not create any new jobs. So, in the end, no one is better off than if everyone could have just agreed to an armistice at the beginning.

Except everyone has a threshold for accepting diminishing returns. The incentive structure doesn't result in everyone escalating the amount of time and effort that goes into an application, because at some point, each individual is going to stop. I'm only going to put in so many hours on my application for any given job, because I recognize the difference between one and three hours is significant, whereas the difference between 15 and 20 hours is not (or at least, it's less significant as I add hours; hence, diminishing returns).

Beyond this (admittedly nit-picky) observation, I find the rest of the article to be rather refreshing and insightful. I think there's good opportunity to use a lottery system as part of a selection/hiring process and if it results in employers dropping all these stupid hoops form their applications, that's a net win for everyone.

The whole point of morality is that we go against our genetic imperatives. Our genes may tell us that we're hungry and we should eat, but morality tells us that say, we should not steal or kill animals or whatever.

It may be possible to pinpoint a part of genes that enable or disable certain moral behavior. But what's to say that the person wouldn't eventually become self-aware of that fact? He becomes aware that a part of his genes is telling him to do something. He starts to think rationally about the fact. He starts to think that the morality that his genes are telling him to have is deplorable. The fact that we have the ability to think rationally means that we can be above our genes.

So genes may tell us to have certain moral behavior. But morality is actually based on rationality. We may or may not listen to our genes. We may actively go against it.

>Why is assisted/suicide due to mental illness still not accepted and illegal?

Probably because to choose assisted suicide, one has to be able to make a rational decision of their own free will. Since mental illness could directly affect the ability to make that decision in a way that physical illnesses wouldn't, lawmakers took the simple way out and blocked all people with mental illnesses.

I can see the logic in that, but I don't think every mental illness prevents the person suffering from it from being able to make a rational choice, and we could rely on doctors to make that determination, just like we already rely on them to determine whether the physical conditions are incurable.

I think people who believe in the death penalty would probably say the right to life is not absolute.

Which implies we can change the degree to which a person feels compelled to engage in moral behavior.

How is that a problem?

And the problem is that we can change our "genes". Our brain contains more information than the information stored in our DNA.

And that problem is solved if we can point to a genetic trait that causes feelings and/or behaviors which we typically associate with morality.

Isn't it? I suppose we could continue to argue otherwise but that just . . . I dunno, seems off somehow.

I will read it and engage in discussion then. Would you like me to tag you in this thread or message you?

(1) is malformed - the meaning is unclear. Are you sure you didn't mean something like "an entity has the right to life iff it is a person" instead?

But this would seem to be a premise that is still likely to suffer rejection in the minds of a capital punishment proponent, as the original disagreement about whether being a person suffices for having the right to life remains applicable.

Because ought is the reality of the future, and we currently live in the present. We're stuck in the present with no access to the future, until we get there.

Morality is "ought", and science is "is". The famous problem is you can't get an ought from an is.