What allows us to conclude that someone is “crazy” is the theories they subscribe to and arguments they use to support them.
Crazy doesn’t always have to mean literally mentally ill. It’s shorthand for *irrational *or ignorant, sometimes deliberately so for self serving purposes, ex. Deepak Chopra pretends to understand quantum physics(5 min YouTube with Richard Dawkins exposing DC for the pseudo-scientific gish-galloping charlatan that he is).
Words aren’t reality. They can describe reality to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy, but they do not create, negate, or quantify reality. You are always free to challenge someone else’s words.
Lemur866’s point that words create social conventions is critical. Physical sciences attempt to accurately describe, quantify and predict physical realities. Social sciences attempt to accurately describe, quantify and predict human-made conventions and interactions. Philosophy cannot be a physical science. Any attempt to make it one will fail, as it does so spectacularly in the examples you give us. Unless you stop treating it like one, you might as well stop posting these threads because the responses you get, at least in this forum, will never vary. One cannot teach the willfully unteachable.
I guess the topic was about how someone could own a piece of reality in any way. Like how does a piece of paper guarantee that.
It’s a popular concept among the “spiritual non dual” types.
The Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot are also popular subjects. What people have to say about them does not bring them into existence.
Are social contracts a completely foreign concept to you, or whomever you’re making this argument for?
And what has this to do with your original OP on the subject of criticism?
Gee, it turns out that a piece of paper doesn’t guarantee anything! What a radical concept. It turns out that sometimes some humans agree to act as if that piece of paper means something, and other times they don’t. And so you have robbery, fraud, and wars of conquest. Human created property rights depend on human beings recognizing and enforcing them, the universe or God won’t do it for us.
What does this have to do with anything? A human claiming he owns such and such land is exactly the same sort of thing as a tiger claiming a territory. Nobody claims the tiger changes reality by its belief that a particular patch of forest belongs to him. The only change is how the tiger acts when another tiger wanders by.
From the first Google hit for “spiritual non dual.”
Would that this would rise to the level of semantics.
Which is why Deepak Chopra is full of shit and must be dismissed, thus.
Sounds like a colossal leap of faith
Then why are you giving it any credence?
Because of the fear of missing out on something big and the fear that what I know to be true is not.
Kind of like what this video says at the 10 min mark on.
There are literally millions of crazy people in the world. Even if you talked to each one for only a minute, you’d spend your whole life doing so and only interview a fraction of them.
So if you’re afraid of missing out, you will absolutely miss out. You only have one life, and that life is finite.
And if you’re afraid of missing out by not picking the gold nuggets out of the piles of insane ranting, why aren’t you afraid of missing out of seeing a beautiful sunset or missing out of seeing the Grand Canyon?
My life is finite. I can only experience a tiny fraction of all the possible experiences a human being can have. Therefore I have to make drastic choices every day about what experiences seem best to me, in my limited fallible judgement. And I’m probably missing out on all sorts of things.
Take my wife. I love her, but is she really the best possible match in the world for me? Of course not! There are probably millions of women in the world who’d make a better wife for me. Or at least thousands, come on. Except I don’t know those women, I can’t find those women, and they aren’t exactly beating down the door to find me either. So I decide to marry the flawed fallible woman who is my wife and the mother of my children, and I possibly missed out on meeting my soulmate because I was on my honeymoon with my merely human wife at the time. Bummer!
And tomorrow I’m going to watch TV with my kids when I could be reading philosophy texts to see if there’s some insight there that could change my life.
Your problem, as I diagnose you via my fallible limited merely human judgement, is that you think first principles and logical consistency are important to living a meaningful life. Except that’s ridiculous. Humans are a particular species of animal, and our lives have no meaning. We’re born, we stumble through the world seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, and then we die, and whether you were a king or a homeless bum everyone ends up forgotten. And so what? My life has no cosmic significance, whether it’s a decent life or a horrible one. The only reason I care about my life is that it’s my life.
What was the first thing I said to you?
I said, “He’s a kook. Don’t obsess. Move on.”
But noooooo…
Except it’s hard to say that to myself because it makes me think I am deluding myself, not to mention he makes a note of something like that in the video.
Like how we trick ourselves into thinking there is an ego and an I, or transcending the concepts that our minds use to navigate the world because that is ultimately a form of delusion.
He’s WRONG. For all practical values of WRONG. We’ve been over this. Dismiss and move on.
But WHY is he wrong
Imagine a man who says every sentence said by a woman is incorrect. It’d be pretty easy to pick at that, right? Why, it’d be the work of a moment to mention sentences that (a) got said by a woman, and (b) were correct. Piece of cake.
But now imagine a man who says that every sentence said by a man is incorrect; before you get around to providing examples, you can just say “hang on; if that were true, then that sentence — the one he just said — would be incorrect!”
That man, see, you could simply write off as wrong.
So let’s say a man criticizes folks by saying that criticism is untenable: do you figure he’s like a man who talks smack about women, such that facts can be brought to bear? Or do you figure he’s like a man who talks smack about men, such that he can simply be disregarded, what with his own lips testifying against him?
(If I take the position that every position a given Senator takes is wrong — well, then, you and me, we can have us a discussion. But if I instead take the position that every position is wrong? Well, then, you can skip the discussion.)
“Images are just pixels, they’re an illusion!”
“Books are just letters on a page, they’re an illusion”
“The mind is really good at figuring out knowledge, but knowledge is an illusion”
He’s wrong in the way most charismatic psychopaths are wrong. They talk shit all day long. They talk in circles, making bullshit claims without the slightest intention of ever backing them up. He’s a charlatan with the gift for gishing gallop. He’s in love with sophistry and the sound of his own voice bouncing inside the echo chamber of his shaved dome.
I’m pressed to find of WHY he’s NOT WRONG.
Given your past posting history, I can see the appeal for you. Shame that you don’t/can’t realize that nothing but madness lies there.
But what if that is the mind/ego being the deceiver and trying to shield you from the truth in front of your eyes?
What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?