urshanabi [he/they]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • Fair enough, apologies for the vagueness.

    I was referring to the first two sentences of your third paragraph. Relativism would look like a kind of correspondence theory of truth which is dependent on where you are geographically and who you interact with socially. Rather than something being true because it corresponds or appears (or is convenient I suppose) to be true as it relates to material phenomena; what is taken as or considered to be true is wholly dependent on what a group one is part of might think. This is relativism as it is 1. not contingent on the natural world, as in the empirical world, so basically stuff we get when we interact with our senses. It’s a bit problematic because one can believe whatever one wishes, this is clearly not a material outlook and can be presumed to bring erroneous thinking or erroneous conclusions somewhere along the line. Any kinds of fantastical thinking can enter the picture, it’s not problematic in itself, but you’ll see most philosophers shy away from it because there are all sorts of problems that come up. Part of the problem people have with postmodernist philosophy is related to this, I’ll leave the explanation out for now, though I recognize it is a lofty claim.

    For 2. solipsism is more or less believing that you are the authority, you can’t be certain others really exist or are equivalent in their capacity as a conscious being as you are. People tend to say, “I can only really know that I exist” and point at Descartes and his maxim Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am which I think is a weird perversion. At any rate, if one takes what one feels or believes or wants to be true, to be true, and solely holds their conception as the only one which matters insofar as it lines up with what they believe, there are similar erroneous conclusions which can arise.

    The link then between 1. and 2. is everything in the world is interpreted in a highly perspectival way in a way which must relate to you. One places themselves at the centre of the universe, thinks their thoughts are actually the way the world works as opposed to convenient heuristics or works-in-progress. An intrasocial network of information, i.e. one’s friends or group, can be the basis for such relativistic thinking, to the exclusion of others which is sorta where you see the tribalism part as well.

    Hope some of that made sense, let me know if it didn’t I’m a bit drowsy from my night medicine, I tried my best to be coherent. Maybe other comrades can chime in and correct me wherever I may have said something wrong or unclear.






  • I didn’t know about him and ASD. Of course creating the environment in society at large (as opposed to small hidden spaces) for women, non-binary, gender diverse and other LGBTQ2SI+ folks is important.

    I really don’t know what a decent method forward is that looks like in a way that in the interim doesn’t lead to issues like the surge of derision and cruelty towards trans folks in the UK. To me, this is evidently something that occurs towards neurodivergent or otherwise broadly defined individuals whom do not conform where gender is not the primary distinguishing factor (lingual, ethnic, etc.)




  • Does it really play ball in the context of metaethics?

    I’ll define morality and ethics as a normative system (operating on different levels of abstraction, with different targets as their focus, but maintaining the same kind of interaction) emergent from imperfect information transmission between any two points in space-time, i.e. the same body at t=n, t=m; or two different bodies at the same time (just to account for quantum stuff) which occur at level of complex life. I’ll say life is any system with the capacity to maintain or decrease entropy (Schrödinger is where I first saw this) for some period of time, and intelligent life meets some threshold for delay or non-direct determinants of information from outside the continuous body to manipulate its environment to a lower entropy state, one which does not as of yet have the same quality of decreasing or maintaining entropy as the intelligent lifeform does.

    In this case, metaethics is a distinction in the realm of a type of interactions yet still a part of them. It’s like one pizza, you can cut it in half and say you have a left half and right each belonging to the meta and non-meta partitions. Or you can say that what we regularly refer to as morals or ethics is simply the toppings, metaethics is the dough which is frankly too frequently ignored in discussions of ethics and pizza-quality. The dough similarly provides the framework or support for the toppings, without which you would have a spread out cheesy and saucy salad (if veggies are a topping, otherwise you have what I make in the middle of the night when I don’t want the microwave to sound off to warm up food that would fill me up) which couldn’t be characterized as pizza.

    Sorry I think I changed topic there, I hope some of the point comes across.







  • Of course! Here’s is a link I have more resources as well if you’d like.

    A quote from another article I have saved:

    According to John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist who specialized in the study of loneliness (he died in 2018), humans would have evolved a built-in bias against easily making friends because avoiding an enemy would have been more important than making a friend. “If I make an error and detect a person as a foe who turns out to be a friend, that’s O.K., I don’t make the friend as fast, but I survive,” Dr. Capiocco said in a 2017 interview in The Atlantic. “But if I mistakenly detect someone as a friend when they’re a foe, that can cost me my life. Over evolution, we’ve been shaped to have this bias.”

    A link for the second article here



  • Interesting, thanks for the response. Robin Dunbar is a psychologist and anthropologist who studies friendship. His claim to fame is ‘Dunbar’s Number’ which is a general statement of how many friends a person can have. It varies from person to person and is influenced by one’s environment, age, beliefs, etc.

    He has a way of expressing how relationships manifest themselves based in closeness, I have an image here.

    This seems to map to what you’re saying. Another thing he said was that the more close friends you have, the less acquaintances you’ll have, and vice versa. There are limits to the number of people you interact with and it can be seen as a sort of hierarchy.

    I wanted to ask to get a better understanding: Why do you prefer more time with your kids and wife? Is the idea that your time is better spent to positively affect them and yourself (i.e. enjoying your time with family) and it’s better to ‘put your eggs in one basket’ so to speak? That there is an investment required to have some kind of benefit to make it worthwhile to spend time with others and with family there is a predictable outcome? Do you ever actively engage in criteria to evaluate the methods, reasons, or heuristics you use to determine who to spend time with or who to allocate resources to?

    My notion is more investment is given to those who we are closer to due to some perceived positive effect but those heuristics are only ever rules of thumb and wholly influenced by reasons outside of our control. The conclusion is made and then we work backwards to find justification.

    I have a friend who spends every weekend with their family, in the infrequent times we do see one another they complain about their parent’s misunderstanding and causing them distress. Rightfully so, as their parents are a bit old-fashioned to say the least. What confused me was, this is a bit machiavellian, they have already seemingly reaped many of the benefits from engaging with their parents and they may be better suited to distributing their time intentionally so as to have a better outcome for themselves and even their parents who are a bit reliant on them and whose ways are set-in further as the friend plays their part in the pattern. They are acclimatized to their environment (with their parents) and the extent that they can predictably or intentionally cause meaningful improvements or positive outcomes is set.

    I always thought it would make sense to continually test alternative strategies because at any point one can become ‘comfortable’ at a given local minima or maxima more or less arresting any further development or change. The violent refusal when the topic is broached, and the absolute certainty to which they claimed their current method was superior caught me off-guard and made me confused.