6 posts shown.
You’re such a tease, Florine. 😁
I was actually torn between the responses provided by absolutely nobody and the insights from enky, but since I’ve always had a soft spot for the ladies, I’m declaring enky my winner while I sit here eagerly awaiting her next thought-provoking question... 🙂
Kenneth Peterson5 said:How are you supposed to actually think?
High-quality.
What does that even mean?
It means you gotta question every single thought that crosses your mind.
Why bother?
Because it’s the only way to get a real grip on the scale and the actual substance of what you're thinking about.
Can you actually grasp the full scope of a thought just by questioning it?
Nope.
Can you nail down the entire content of a thought through questioning?
Not a chance.
So why the hell do people say high-quality thinking equals constant questioning?
Because it's the only way we ever stand a shot at reaching the unthinkable.
And what’s "unthinkable"?
The unthinkable is actually being able to think with high quality, non-stop.
Back when I was just a kid in elementary school, my friends and I would constantly get ourselves into some kind of ridiculous mess, usually resulting in us being the butt of every joke. Whenever that happened, my old man would always look at me and say, "That’s what happens, son, when you don't use your own good sense." At the time, through that foggy lens of childhood, I found myself wondering... what exactly constitutes one's "own good sense," and does that imply that someone else's logic is somehow inherently flawed?
What is an idea, really, and can I ever truly claim ownership over my own thoughts? Perhaps I picked up a notion while standing in line at the CVS, or maybe I absorbed it without even realizing it while eavesdropping on a conversation on the subway, or perhaps I simply wasn't vigilant enough to stop the politicians on the news from shoving their agendas into my head, or even those relentless commercials that seem to bypass my defenses and seep directly into my consciousness...
Yet, even if I can't be certain which specific thoughts are truly mine, I hold onto the belief that "I" am, fundamentally, the sum of my thoughts.
I’d like to jump in here and add my congratulations to the mix as well...
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Question number 6:
What is the proper way to think?
Lawrence Robinson5 said:Humans exploit everything: other people, different species, the entire planet...
We’re inherently selfish, and even when we try to be selfless, it’s usually just a thinly veiled way to feed our own egos.
Humanity is the root cause of ecological imbalance; we're the only species actively fighting against the very system we belong to...
And then you have the complete opposite:
"Man is a noble creature, the measure of all things," and so on and so forth.
I’ve been feeling a bit lost lately navigating the constant contradictions in how we judge our own species. I see so many posts on this forum where the tone is heavy with disappointment and condemnation, even when people are trying their hardest to sound objective... and I can't help but wonder why.
It feels like there are really only two ways to look at this:
1) Humans are simply part of nature—which means we aren't inherently "good" or "bad," we're just biological facts. Everything we do happens because the environment we inhabit allows us to do it, so the evolution of our species—including all those messy mistakes we make while learning—is still just evolution, not some kind of cosmic destruction.
2) Humans are not part of nature—we've broken away, warped ourselves, and now we're just a burden to ourselves and everyone else. Our society is unnatural, our thoughts are unnatural, our very feelings are unnatural...
Since the second option clearly doesn't hold water, isn't it a total rookie mistake for a thinker to claim that a human action is wrong *a priori*?
Human civilization is a natural phenomenon precisely because we are a product of nature. That doesn't mean we aren't responsible for what we do—but responsibility can only lie with the individual, because the individual is the only one actually acting. Society, as an abstract concept, can't take the blame for the things that make us feel guilty; blaming "society" is often just a psychological trick to scrub our own consciences clean of actions we aren't proud of...
Conscience is also a natural phenomenon, just like accountability. A dog doesn't run from a crime scene—not because it's incapable of doing something "wrong," but because it doesn't view its actions through that lens. That doesn't make humans unnatural; it just makes us different... and honestly, animals do show a sense of conscience; it's almost funny, like watching a toddler who knows they did something they weren't supposed to and tries to hide so they won't get grounded... but we only really see animal consciousness when we use punishment to train them—which is a fundamentally flawed (and unfortunately common) way to link those two ideas together...
Every person, like every living thing, knows when they aren't doing the "right" thing—because that's when they are acting against what they actually want. A dog knows it shouldn't swipe a steak off the dinner table, but sometimes it does it anyway because it wants that steak—and we do the exact same thing, just in much more complex ways.
Our true nature hasn't been corrupted; it's just buried under layers of "civilized" behavior. We've adopted hundreds of social rules about what's allowed and what isn't, spent lifetimes inventing justifications for them, and ended up in a place where there's no room left for honest, natural desire.
The real irony is that these rules were born out of distrust toward our own natural impulses. It was a lack of faith in our own correct judgment that led us to outsource our decision-making to others, and eventually, to dump all responsibility onto an abstract entity: society.
Society isn't some freakish mutation; it's just the physical manifestation of the human idea of itself—as a being that isn't allowed to, doesn't know how to, and shouldn't... it's the natural expression of a natural mental capacity: the ability to doubt, even our own selves. And if we don't like it, it's only because we are all participants in that doubt.
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
Shakespeare definitely saw it coming...
It isn't that we merely accepted these rules; we actively manufactured them... and in doing so, we birthed guilt, which is truly the mother of all the darkness within us. Is it really "natural" to feel this crushing sense of guilt just for having a "desire"? When you look closer, you realize that even those desires are often shaped by that very same "abstract" society. I can't help but wonder if we could run an experiment where no one was ever punished for anything, where everything was absolutely permitted... would crime skyrocket, would it plummet, or would it stay exactly the same? It seems humans have become hardwired to police the "darkness" within ourselves and others—to judge it, to punish it, to serve its sentence—all because of this pervasive distrust, without ever bothering to dig deep enough to find out where that darkness actually originated...
Generally speaking, it’s much easier for us to label the parts of ourselves we perceive as "darkness" as some kind of sickness or deformity—something caused by outside forces that we can eventually "cure"—rather than simply accepting that these traits are an inherent part of our nature, given to us by the universe itself... 😁 This whole notion of what constitutes "darkness" within a person is really just a byproduct of various preconceived notions and behaviors that society and the system have carefully constructed and labeled as "desirable."