Nilsi

with all due respect, why do you speak on things you don’t know anything about? this is such a comical surface-level reading of nietzsche, which is precisely what leads to bad reputation and misunderstanding of his work.

i'm surprised that's your answer. green is certainly a step in the right direction, but it isn't up for the task of creating a thriving society. as you said, it's about opening the heart, deconstructing the falsehoods of prior stages, etc. there is the possibility of critique and protest, but no serious engagement with the actual complexity of reality that would be necessary for actualizing these values on a global scale. turquoise is precisely strategic green, and anything short of that should not be leading us anywhere.

also, where did you get the idea that all philosophy is academic? most of the greats in western philosophy weren’t academics, and those who were used academia merely as a way to provide for themselves, not as some kind of sacred institution where courting and climbing the social ladder became the sole purpose of their work. i feel stupid bringing up this example over and over, but just look at nietzsche. he literally lived alone in the mountains for years just to think, write, and dedicate himself utterly to the pursuit of truth. to dismiss this as “academic nonsense” is beyond ignorant. there are many similar cases, even if someone has spent some time in academia as a means to provide for themselves, as nietzsche did early in his life (youngest professor of philology in history; lived off his pension after retiring in his 30s).

huh? did i express myself so poorly? my claim is that studying the works of great men who have dedicated their lives to understanding allows you to differentiate yourself and find your own path. for all you know, you are re-treading where someone has already been. i'm not saying become a scholar and stop thinking for yourself. i'm saying you don’t even know what thoughts have already been thought if you dismiss all human knowledge on principle. you're not as special and great as you pretend to be, and "insight from deep direct experience" is not that original of an idea either and pursuit either. your flippant dismissal of my comment, which, judging from your reply, you couldn’t have read with any degree of attention and earnestness, shows me how deeply you are willing to engage with perspectives other than your own.

that's quite misleading. his whole philosophy is based on the concept of will and representation. where the will is, what we would ordinarily call the „self“ and representation is the world as it appears, i.e. „samsara.“ representation is seen as the outward reflection, the mirror image of the will; whereby the will is paradoxically entangled in representation and "willing" is the denial of the world as is. the resolution for schopenhauer is what he calls "self-realization," of which he says: so he's not saying, "it's all gloom and doom;" "god is an evil bastard;" "it's all a failed experiment;" or any such thing. he's saying: shut the fuck up, stop wanting life to be different from what it is, and you will see clearly the love, tranquility and freedom that has always already been. now what does that tell you about friedrich nietzsche who saw schopenhauer as his greatest teacher and talked of him in ways like: and would characterize what he learnt from his teacher as follows: it's true respect for your master to not just regurgitate the same old shit he has taught you, but to honor him by carrying the baton forward towards ever greater heights of human achievement. next in line in this lineage of transmission is probably deleuze, who hasn't yet had a deserving student who saw the light shining through his work the way he saw it in nietzsche, and of which ken wilber, with all due respect, is only a crude caricature.

i see where you’re coming from, but that seems a little sketchy. discarding the 2,500-year-old lineage of wisdom that is western philosophy as a "waste of time" is quite bold. how many times have you had insights you thought were original, only to find someone had already had that insight and written extensively on it? i get that western philosophy, especially contemporary european philosophy, can be quite arcane and hard to penetrate. it assumes a lot of prior knowledge and puts the burden on the student to follow the thread to the actual insight. but still, if it were easy to crack, it couldn’t be that subtle of an insight. even your point about focusing on direct insight and experience sounds to me, as a bystander, a lot like what husserl was attempting with his phenomenological method. i’d bet there is a lot in there (and in studying the work of his student heidegger, who was extraordinarily intelligent and must have had good reasons to sway from this methodology) that primes you to be more nuanced and nudges you toward actual novel insights. not that i’m placing any special importance on these particular individuals, but to me that would be low-hanging fruit to reach for if i were to undertake a similar project to yours. you can spare yourself a lot of time and avoid many dead ends by studying the history of philosophy rigorously. wouldn’t it be the biggest loss to find out that you’re chasing a dragon that has already been slain? i’m not saying that’s you, but if i were to ditch the entire philosophical tradition of our species, i better be sure that i’m not missing something somewhere.

• The Beatles • Pink Floyd • Tool • Led Zeppelin • Queen Share yours

„Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden — unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus.“ - Friedrich Nietzsche

so you like progressive music infused with jazz and classical elements? i'm surprised you didn't bring up king crimson - they would have been the first band i thought of if i only read your descriptions of what makes you like those bands. especially their more avant-garde (avant-prog, as they say) stuff, I can really get behind. also, what do you think about john zorn? he should also be in the ballpark of things you like, yet i've never heard you discuss him or his band. probably the greatest of all the avant-prog artists, if you ask me.

this is one of the most criminally underrated records of all time (by casual listeners and critics alike). such a transcendent musical statement, which 15 years later is still way ahead of its time and will go on to be extremely influential in the realm of experimental/industrial/post rock for a long fucking time.

peak sonic youth is in a league of their own; the creative output and influence they had over 30 years of releasing music is insane.

i will say that regular racetam use has caused me to be unable to orgasm. my libido is just as high, intercourse feels as good as ever and my performance isn't compromised as far as i can tell, but when i cum, i literally don't feel anything besides the relief of tension from releasing my sexual energy. no pleasure whatsoever.

you make a good argument, which is essentially a classic freudian argument about death drive and repetition compulsion, but it's an incomplete view without a complex systems lens, and i'm quite critical of such overextensions of psychoanalytic theory.

i just thought about how much my views on this have changed over the years. nowadays, it would probably be something like: sonic youth swans the velvet underground kraftwerk portishead i wonder if your guys' views have changed as well.

subjectively, i like phenylpiracetam the most out of all the racetams, but omberacetam (noopept) seems to be the one that has been studied the most and is deemed generally safe, so that's my daily one (5 days on, 2 days off). i stack it with fasoracetam for its upregulatory effects on gaba, so i can be a dirty phenibut abuser and alcoholic on the weekend when i want to without developing much of a tolerance (i take nac and milk thistle extract, and many polyphenols and antioxidants to mitigate some of the negative side effects of these substances, which i of course don't endorse, but hey, you gotta have some fun from time to time). also, i'm a heavy smoker, so i probably have some kind of cholinergic fixation.

it doesn't, because its existence is contingent on these survival challenges. it evolves forever, which isn't to imply some teleology; it could also devolve, depending on who or what defines these terms. but it always self-organizes, i.e., it is alive.

any complex self-organizing system (like society and life at large) can only exist against a background of chaos. for example, humans (and by extension society) couldn't have evolved if it weren't for the intrinsic survival challenges that bipedal ape-like species were facing. complexity is literally the product of the process of solving and adapting to existential problems.

You can trust a human to know what it’s like to be a human… the joy, the sorrow; the feeling of being in love for the first time; what it’s like to belong and to be a misfit; the wonder that comes from gazing into the night sky; the sensation of hot summer wind on your skin; how it feels to witness injustice and the fire it lights up within oneself to do something about it, and perhaps not knowing what to do about it at all; the utter importance of a hug… and any „intelligence“ that doesn’t have these experiences as the basis of its agency is not ever to be fully trusted.

Give these people some views. 19 clicks in 15 hours??? That should be criminal.

Wouldn’t you agree that when you’re in love with someone, you would want to be able to understand and empathize with them as deeply as possible, knowing fully well that their identity is infinitely complex and you will never get to the bottom of it for all eternity? And isn’t that desire and tenacity in loving and getting to know them the true mark of intelligence? Same goes for any object of desire. And why would you even care about understanding anything you don’t love? Isn’t that stupidity? Your point may hold for pragmatic purposes, like understanding enough about a toothbrush to know how to use it, but beyond that it doesn’t hold up.

To be fair, you’re not making it easy to grasp what you’re getting at, so I just ran with the associations that came to mind. That’s the only way I know how to respond to such obscurity, and it usually leads to more clarity, although in your case, I can’t say that’s true.