Philosophy

I guess this was mainly a Continental thing, but for a while philosophers often wrote novels that in some way expounded their philosophy. I think Nietzsche was perhaps one of the earliest, with Zarathustra. All the French existentialists wrote novels, too. What happened to this trend?

EDIT: I just realised that arguably this goes back all the way to Plato! But I was thinking less of straightforward, largely plot-free dialogues and more of full fledged novels, like Sartre's Nausea.

Is there really no alternative justice system than crime and punishment? Seems that punishments are taken for granted as necessary and that we only debate on the reason it is accepted.

If not, can someone explain why it isn't?

Other than (metaphysical) anti-realism, which I'm under the impression is an umbrella for all types of denial that there is an independent, external reality.

I suppose you could even envision someone taking the stance that there is an external reality, because they have found empirical proof, which would make them a realist as well as a proponent of whatever this is.

The harm of religion is historically evident whereas the presence or absence of gods is not. Ultimately, the continued existence of religion is predicated on the indoctrination of children and suppression of rational thought. Therefore I am against religion but not necessarily against the idea of gods. For all we know gods are computer scientists and we are in their video game.

This guy single handedly put so many of my "feelings about the world" into context. It's a lecture series which goes through the aspects of philosophy trying to explore the topic of "Meaning".

For an novice like me, he related so many different concepts together and showed the nuances between ideologies throughout the world and various periods.Like a bore hole through the past.

Surprised it's free and glad it exists. Maybe one of you might find some video interesting. ~If you have any similar recommendations, feel free to share!~

Media file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/philosophizethis/Panpsychism_final.mp3?dest-id=144660

Perhaps this framework can be used as an attack on materialist environmentalists as much as capitalist industrialists and exploitative corporations. Start seeing forests and lakes as beings and not merely resources.

I've noticed a pattern, that wealth is privacy. If you take for example how people live.

1. Homeless, outdoors. No privacy at all.
2. Shared apartment
3. Private apartment with shared outdoor space
4. Private house
5. Gated community
6. Gated private estate

Or how people travel.

1. Walking in the street in full public view
2. On a bus or train or aeroplane
3. In a car
4. In a private convoy surrounded my staff, or in a private jet.

The poorest are always in public, in everything they do. The wealthiest are never seen, except when they choose to appear. There is a continuum in between of increasing wealth meaning increasing privacy.

But there are other possible perspectives. Wealth is the freedom to waste.

With wealth you can buy many things and leave them idle or dump them. You can travel and live and eat in wasteful ways. You can hire people to work for you, doing things you don't really need.

Things which are expensive are (to a large extent) so because their production is wasteful. The rich can utilise more expensive things.

So the problem with too much global consumption - too much emissions, electricity usage, mining, etc - is really a problem of too many rich people. There is no point restricting or banning these things - people will just find other ways to be wasteful - maybe even worse ones. The only way to solve these crisis is reduce wealth, by reducing inequality.

Wealth is power over people. Wealth is required to compel people to do things, to directly pay them to do your bidding, or to access the fruits of hours of labour through purchases. There is also bribery, access to lawyers etc, which allow more wealthy people to exert more power over their peers and society.

Are there other ways to understand wealth?

Socrates sought out those with reputations for wisdom. Who were the wise men he interviewed?

This is actually not stupid.

I also laughed when I first heard about it (5 minutes ago).

We focus a lot on managing time. But there are other finite resources we have to manage within each day.

• mental energy
• attention
• physical energy
• concentration
• frustration
• creativity
• patience
• many more

You can only spend so much of each one before becoming exhausted.

Spoon theory deals with one of these things - physical energy. And the article is well explained. So it's a good introduction to this kind of thinking.

You can go much further in this thinking than the article. Think about management. You normally assign tasks to whoever has the free time. But people have different amounts of patience to spend each day. So if one of your people has a lot of patience, you should assign him the task, because he can spend a lot before running out.

But if you have two tasks requiring a lot of patience, that guy might run out. So you assign the second task to someone else.

It's basically very intuitive. But it's helpful to think about it the same way we think about time. To quantify it.