/philosophy/ - Philosophy

A miserable little pile of secrets!

penis

A misogynistic rapist.

A temporary cluster of matter.

You are not your body. The organs that you have now are comprised of different matter than the same organs you had this same time last year. The only thing that has remained consistent is your genetic code (which also changes over time.) Your physiological need to eat is your body telling you to replace the matter that's falling off/coming out of your body. The only thing that's stayed the same is the idea behind "you." And even that goes away when you die.

>>11
That's very poetic of you.

>>11
Tell me something I don't know.

>>11
Hurr muh scientific reductionism.
>Science explains 'how', not 'why', you generic Analyticfag

An evolving system, most popularly within the parameters of the parts of the brain responsible for the aware and semi-aware portions of the mind. When thinking of yourself, this is the backbone of how you define yourself. When thinking of others, you're taking all of the expressed characteristics and experiences you have witnessed of them and formulating a best guess of what their consciousness is – a concept refined with familiarity.

While most popular in terms of human life and interactions, that doesn't really encompass all of what a man's mind is, does it? We must also include the workings of the brain responsible for man's nature, for shaping his consciousness, and of course what leads to man's society… where the man becomes a cell in a greater organism.

This is what a man is.

Perhaps what most separates man from, say, a tree, a table, or a dog, is his capacity for self-awareness.

>>2
a boy given responsibility

Man is a pattern.

I am struggling with a particular excerpt. how do i reference to you, the part of the text with which i am having trouble? Merely copying and pasting it seems crass.

there are numbers and letters like [a] [2] peppered throughout the text, i have an inclination these are part of how something shoud be done, but i do not see the lines that join the dots

>>64
disregard that, i suck sweet athenian cocks

If a biological sex, well, that.
If masculinity, the societal opinion of what that is at the time.

A manual.

>>2
A featherless biped

Is the power in his hand?
Is it his quest for glory?

>>116
"Look! It's Plato's man!"
-Motherfuckin' Diogenes, bitch

A creative nothingness.
A reflective space within a semantic and ontological void.

A metaphysical entity interacting with the physical world

An individual being composed of body and soul, namely the matter and form.

I realized I can't sense my body. I am gone all but for these windows that I see the world through. A breath, from deep somewhere, I don't know where, but I can feel it. I'm here, I precieve, What the fuck is going on?

Man is an entity that seeks to mate, and discover.

Man is an ape.
Tribalistic, savage, competitive, intelligent, scheming, social, and dextrous. Every ape quality cranked up about one level.

>>2
A symbol.

>>11

The last time I felt this insignificant it was after I read all 700 pages of the Oxford Edition "Critique of Pure Reason" by Kant.

>>2

Physical embodiment of the rape desire.

Okay, but seriously– What are the tropes that we bundle together to make a man?

Age, size, strength, prowess– how many more am I missing here? Not important to list all of them, only to point out that there are a series of physical and intangible conditions that we require for "man".

"Man" is a mental construction and therefore cannot possibly be a distinct and regularly recreateable assembly. It changes over time and exists more-or-less in the same relation to its negation, woman.

I've always found the ability to create meaning, meaningfulness, and depth to be particularly typical for man[kind].

>>19
The question was "what" not "why", so replying with empiric reductionism is a valid approach. I'd be intrigued to see your alternate take on the question though.

>>302
B-but Kant is totally empowering in his critique.

>>304
"Woman" is not the negation of "man."

>>305

"Woman" is no the negation of "man."

This was the best working example I could come up with in 15 seconds. I'll take a better one if you've got it.


Kan't Critique of Pure Reason is fucking scary if you take it to its ends. CPR says that we can never KNOW that God exists, we will never be able to empirically prove his existence, and any investigation into the predicate behind every subject can only yield another subject with its own predicate so on and so forth ad indefinitum. An infinity of materially profane investigations that will never deliver us to something higher.

>>306
I'm not entirely sure what kind of working example you were even looking for.

>Kant
Yes, but that's not the main jist of the Critique. It's about how we are able to make a priori statements about a world that is structurally different from how our mind works. And he solves that by arguing that our mind is in fact what shapes the world in such a way so as it's even percievable and structureable to our selves. Sure, that means that we can never see what the world is "truly" [read: without us] like, but 'seeing' that is an impossible demand anyway. But it does allow us to have certainty, which is more than can be said for most philosophical theories.

And I don't see why you want 'something higher' to begin with. Kant's theory is transcendental in nature, that in itself is as close to metaphysics as an empirically inclined mind can go.

>>2
That really depends on how you define man.If you define it biologically a man is a human with a penis.
If you defined it with Confucianism, a man is an achievement a person can obtain. Being a "Man" is really a symbol of higher morals, and following those morals.

a human bean

>>2

Man is the manifestation of the master law of the universe.

According to Aristote, a man is someone who lives by their principles. He also is rational : NOT A RETARDED CRIPPLE.

>>19
"Why" a man is is also scientific territory.

a hairless biped

>>565
Check out baldy here.

Dasein, or "Being-there"

>>629
brilliant.

>>633
Please Anon, dasein is just stating the obvious. Heidegger just loves that.

>>633
So, if a mice "exists" (in the sense of "being-there") then it is a human? and yea, this sophitry is just to show you the absurd that is to define a human by a concept such as dasein.

>>675
So then I guess you think the job of philosophy is to ignore the obvious, and perhaps allow thought to become divorced from reality.

Shouldn't philosophy begin with the obvious and then work its way to the profound?

>>676
Has a mouse ever announced its existence to you? And can any core definition of human consciousness exclude the idea of Dasein?

>>678
Youa re adressing to the same person, this needs a ID system.

Anyways, dasein is something like "the state of existing somewhere sometime", just a like a mice exists somewhere, sometime.

t does not have anything to do with declaring its own existence into the the world.

My problem is, dasein is just a statement of facts, and nothing else. I exist, in some point of the spacetime, therefore im "in-the-world". You know what knowledge this amounts to? not much. Just like any statement of facts like "Oranges are acid" or "the rock is there".

Shoudn´t we be more concerned about "what knowledge is?" or "How can we understand each other though language?", those are the truly deep questions and are at the core of most of our concerns about existence and the world.

>>683
It´s redundant, merely a statement fo fact directed instead of others, to yourself, its called "self-feeding" information, it does not server any purpose than to recognize yourself as an being currently occupying some space.

But i see how this could differentiate between men and mices, for example.

But, let me say this:
Could an alien mind, or even an artificial intelligence, make this self-statement?

Obviously, yes.
Then this self-affirmation is an inherent essence of "rational" or "self-aware" minds.Not an exclusive trait of man.

You know what i mean?

>>690
*How is it that we come to 'know'?

What anything is is completely subjective.
Are you asking me for my own personal subjective view on the matter or are you asking for a defacto answer? I can give you the first but I don't the latter exists and if it does I don't believe we would be capable of understanding it if it did.

To me, at this moment, I believe as a man I am part of the universe that has been put in a certain arrangement that appears to allow me to be consciously be aware of it. I don't know what allows me to exists, or what the exact mechanisms allow me to perceive existence are but I believe I am a "living" part of the universe.

Nothing truly separates me from the outside, what I refer to as Brahman, but my own self, or what I refer to as my Atman. I don't know the complete nature of either of these two seemingly existing entities but I feel as though they exist through my own experiments with my consciousness and what I hope is a rational train of thinking.
I feel man's mission, and the mission for all things in life is to reach some sort of connection or understanding of a connection between yourself and the outer universe.

I feel as if my thoughts are a stream line of energy created by the machine the is my brain. I collect energy from the food I eat which is the same energy the encompasses everything in the universe. Any thoughts I have are the universe's thoughts being channeled through me essentially. All my actions are essentially the universe's actions, you can't really do anything you weren't supposed to do and I feel that the fact you exist at all and are capable of understanding and perceiving the universe means that the universe at some point "meant" to have you around. If you weren't supposed to be here, if you weren't supposed to do something, you wouldn't have.
To quote Lennon

"Nothing you can know that isn't known
Nothing you can see that isn't shown
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be
It's easy".

The whole song All You Need is Love ties in to what I'm trying to say. I feel that this song is pretty under appreciated and its meaning is often lost on people, but I believe that John was speaking of this outer Brahman and the love that you can feel from it through your Atman. That exists and that's pretty much all you really need. The universe, whatever the fuck it is, sentient or not, random or structured, decided at one point that you would exist and I don't think we as humans even are capable of understanding what that even means that the glory that existing even is. To understand that we would have to experience non-existence and I doubt that is something most people would be comfortable or capable of experiencing.
I think that life randomly occurred in this system just like the system itself randomly occurred and our job now essentially is to try and find our connection and that is pretty much the only way to find meaning in life.
Life essentially is meaningless but not because without life a word like meaningless would also be meaninglessness.

Anyway, I'm kinda rambling here it's kinda hard to format proper thoughts and arguments on the chans cause of how small this chat windows. These are just my thoughts at the moments, although there is some ambiguity to how I can define "my thoughts" but I think I went into enough of that earlier.

I hope someone reading this takes something from it and I wish all of you luck in finding some sort of meaning yourself in the universe. Be it through exposing yourself to the loving embrace of Krishna, Brahma, or any other of its innumerable names or perhaps even another path that suits your experiences in this universe better. Feel free to email me back any thoughts you might have, might get some trolls but I hope to hear some of your ideas on what we all are.

Namaste

>>690
I need to reflect on this, this way of thinking has its merits but i cannot bring myself to completely agree with this.

It seems to me that your phenomenology wants to replace the science in understanding the inner workings of our rationality.

>>Well, and I say this with utmost respect to you, if there are any pointless questions being brought up between us, surely it is this one. We are comparing man to beings which we cannot point out to and say that they exist.

Its an hypothesis, i created a third-party to represent a possibility: that there are, indeed, rational aliens and they have similar thought patterns we do. Of course, if an sentient alien must exist, there´s no obligation we can understand their thought patterns, BUT, im here considering the possibility that they have.

You understand what i mean? the original question of this post is: what is a man?
you answered:
>> Dasein, or "Being-there"

Since you said this, i must obligatorily assume that the dasein must be something ONLY humans has and i said "well, WHAT IF, there are aliens or AIs running around asking questions similar to our own? do they have dasein? do they say "cogito ergo sum" to themselves and recognize in themselves, the very fact of existence? if so, then dasein cannot represent the defining feature of man.

The problem is, we can´t really know (my "obvious yes" was a mistake on my part), and as such, we cannot rationally guarantee that dasein, even if true, is the essential thing that defines a human being.

A featherless biped with broad nails.