tsukiko

Sober Knitter (bet y'wish y'were never kind 'nough to reply now, eh ) -

If you read no more of my reply (I would hardly blame you) but I meant William Burroughs* when I said 'Burroughs', sorry.

Personally, I don't call anything a good thing (or a bad thing), I just like hearing other opinions / views on stuff. Engaging in sport may statistically and according to the law of averages, prolong life - - but it can easily be abused or used to shorten life too…like most things. Did you know those who regularly exceed the 'healthy recommended drinking limit' in the UK actually live longer than both those who stay within it and those who abstain completely...and I've hit myself with hammers and self harmed for a long time until I disfigured my own arm permanently, actually. I broke bones. I threw myself down staircases. I was modelling at the time and sort of ended my career before it really began because I kept shovelling booze and drugs and disfiguring myself. And I'm not even an extreme example, just a convenient one.

I don't disagree that if every human thought through the framework you've laid out we wouldn't all be a lot more healthy, just that the reason many people don't - the reason people, in actual fact, do use heroin and stab themselves...and stab each other etc...is both because and evidence that nothing is black and white when it comes to humans; nothing is purely rational; we'd be robots. If they were there would be no philosophy, no discussions like this one...

Truth is not subjective? It can be argued to be as successfully as it can be argued there is no truth etc etc…

browse this: Truth (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). We use sense experience and logic to assess truth - and we can apply the methods we use to assess the 'truth' and 'reality' of something (be it the existence of a solid, corporeal object or an abstract concept) to prove that both our senses and logic itselfare not trustworthy or to be trusted as means of assessing the 'truth' of anything...hence (using the very same critera, seen as it is all we have, we reach the conclusion that) we use what we call 'truth' and 'logic' because they are all we have, not because either are 'true' anymore than it was true the world was flat because we had not 'reason' then to think otherwise.

Descartes Meditations are more articulate than I am in explaining sense deception and, again, (William) Burroughs' and the address above explore and explain the rest of what I'm trying to say.

Nietzsche is a good one, to mention him again too...the very idea that we can assume or be complacent about notions of an 'objective truth' or that logic is something we shouldn’t be wary of and question as much as anything else (ironic, I know, but not doing...) leads to things like the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a logical solution, completely unethical, but completely logical and the result was millions or deaths. Millions upon millions. Those deaths seemed illogical and were to many because they were stood in a different position, experiencing (directly or indirectly) what was happening from a different angle. Hence, whether you argue logic and truth are subjective or that people come to different but equally logical conclusions because no two people are ever in the same situation at the same time, experiencing the same things (hormonally, emotionally, physiologically, visually…the list goes on), but that is just semantics, ain’t it? …again, read Nietzsche, he explains these ideas far more articulately than I can.


And Again, I (personally) totally agree that the standpoint you write from demonstrates 'a positive thinking framework conducive to creating and sustaining a "high quality" of life'. But, the same way you choose to use logic to 'see things as good' is exactly the same formulae of thinking a junkie uses to 'see' using as the logical thing to do and hence, simply 'the thing to do' according to the current fashion in science (which last season was God)......and the irony for me is that without drugs etc I've never found a way of processing or managing or even just being able to 'accept’ …well, anything because I’m actually a very logical and pragmatic person; I wouldn’t question logic if I wasn't. And I wouldnt have been a junkie either.


All our ways of trying to work out whether a thing exists (eg, truth) objectively, hence beyond the human mind or human perception is...well, beyond the human mind while our tools are limited to our senses and logic or reason. Hence, my attempts to be satisfied with any life (I wasn't satisfied as a junkie, hence not being one now) is - to use logical reasoning, in all probability, unlikely.


That ain't to say I'm gonna' use drugs again or even have a 'bad quality of life' necessarily, it’s just I haven’t yet found any way(s) to hush up my mind from going 'but why?' constantly…without filling myself with things like heroin. And when you don’t know how to turn off the 'but why?' it’s like living with an alarm clock or smoke alarm that never stops beeping; instead of keeping you from falling asleep or saving you from danger, it starts to make you want to fall asleep or put yourself in danger just because sleep and danger are two of the very few things that drown it out so you can, ironically, get some respite. And I guess that's how people really do come to hit themselves with hammers...not once, but out of habit; if it works, even in the short term, people will do it...if their threshold is reached and they see no other or favourable alternative people will do it, whatever ‘it’ is. Again, that is an example of logic...the same logic that has you knit or has a junky fix up. It may not seem logical to an ‘outsider’, but not seeing something (according to logic anyway) don’t mean it ain’t there or ‘true’…



Anyhow, that’s my mumbling over, for now *yawn.