Someone please help this guy. (Not sure if it's Vladamir or Estragon.)

How to Be an Existentialist: 10th Anniversary Edition by Gary Cox, 2020

The 10th anniversary edition of a witty classic about the philosophy of existentialism. It is also a genuine self-help book offering clear advice on how to live according to the principles of existentialism formulated by Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and the other great existentialist philosophers.

@bookstodon
#books
#nonfiction
#philosophy
#existentialism
#SelfHelp

The Plato Plateau

This post started off as a joke. I was attempting to snow clone the Peter Principle for philosophy. It led to a longer thread of thoughts. But first, the snow clone: 

The Plato Plateau: People philosophize to the level of their anxiety.

1. Anxiety is the realization that you have absolute choice over life – Kierkegaard. Anxiety, in this context is not nervousness. It is a positive thing when harnesses. We harness it everyday.  
2. Anxiety is a generative. Anxiety creates identity by locating stable places to launch exploration.
3. Action, exploration, and anxiety are a motor. Anxiety → exploration → action → refreshed identity. Inaction leads to identity death
4. Realizing you are radically free to choose can also lead to a forest of perceived signals. These can be an overwhelming inbox or simply overloaded ambition.
5. When anxiety overwhelms it becomes difficult to tell signal from noise.
6. Tools like GTD crash anxiety. When overwhelmed, GTD works well. When there is too little anxiety identity becomes ephemeral. 
7. GTD isn’t a means to nirvana: GTD integrates 10k, 30k foot views to reintroduce future anxiety.
8. When your identity is smeared across too many anxieties you declare anxiety bankruptcy and crash your identity in some safe spot. Journals, sabbaticals, quitting.
9. Like the parable of the rock soup, vaporized anxiety needs a place to condense onto. Ideally something disposable but sufficient to let your identity create an “ordered world of meaning”
10. Life examination occurs with identity crashes. Philosophy provides just enough of a toehold in the abstract to spur action in the actual. 
11. Philosophy is a way to spur action absent anxiety/identity. We pick the philosophy depending on the degree of identity loss.
12. Philosophy can be broadly sorted as:
    1. Survival – laws and tactics oriented
    2. Social Cohesion- harmony, virtue ethics, etiquette 
    3. Systems level order – algorithms and protocols oriented
    4. Self Knowledge and Meaning – reflecting on existing and consciousness 
    5. Meta-systems – theorizes about theories
13. Most scientists and builders work best at level 3 systems level order. Going lower, i-ii, for environmental crises and higher, iv-v, for internal crises. 
14. Complexity of selected philosophy is not superiority. A rung’s usefulness matches your identity state and environment, not some civilizational high score.
15. Philosophy as Periodic Maintenance: Crashing and philosophy sampling are maintenance actions on the place called identity.

Summer reading sale -- $3.99. ($6 off until July 22nd)

★★★★★ "Mark A. Rayner writes in gorgeous prose and has a unique gift for plot ... and creating characters that are rock-solid and relatable." –Matthew Novak, The Book Commentary

Books2Read: https://books2read.com/u/m0olnY
Amazon: https://geni.us/AlphaMax

I just came across a web article about Lana Del Rey and Philosophy, Existentialism.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, intellectuals, but these kind of media publications are useful to spread philosophy conversations.
They are welcome.

P.S. Lana Del Rey is great, if you disagree then go study Aesthetics other than Existentialism.

#Philosophy
#Existentialism
#LanaDelRey

Don't even get me started on how hard it is to stare into the inaccessible void.

Bon anniversaire, Jean-Paul ! #Sartre #existentialism

#art #history: 'when the rich go to war, it's the poor who pay.'
jean-paul sartre, born #otd in 1905, will always be relevant - & this rumination of his is one of many reasons that i embraced existentialism over nihilism.
it instructed me that 'being' is an individual's responsibility, but that we all, as humans, have a collective responsibility to each other.
anyway, j-p was a righteous dude.

#jeanPaulSartre
#sartre
#philosophy
#illustration
#france
#existentialism

Pithy thoughts on thinking by dustin curtis

I have been stuck. Every time I sit down to write a blog post, code a feature, or start a project, I come to the same realization: in the context of AI, what I’m doing is a waste of time. It’s horrifying. The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. All of my original thoughts feel like early drafts of better, more complete thoughts that simply haven’t yet formed inside an LLM.

Thoughts on thinking

I thought I was using AI in an incredibly positive and healthy way, as a bicycle for my mind and a way to vastly increase my thinking capacity. But LLMs are insidious–using them to explore ideas feels like work, but it’s not real work. Developing a prompt is like scrolling Netflix, and reading the output is like watching a TV show. Intellectual rigor comes from the journey: the dead ends, the uncertainty, and the internal debate. Skip that, and you might still get the insight–but you’ll have lost the infrastructure for meaningful understanding. Learning by reading LLM output is cheap. Real exercise for your mind comes from building the output yourself.

Some of these resonate. I’ve also been using LLMs since the GPT3 days and following them since the GPT2 days. I remember suggesting GPT 2 as a path forward to a friend who was trying to build a classifier for their project.

I am not as worried as dustin even if the thoughts resonate with me. The value from thinking, from mulling, from iterating, from compounding had two parts – internal satisfaction and external validation (when you broadcasted the thoughts with others). There was a time where the sheer act of broadcasting earned you an audience – because not enough people shared.

We’ve gone the other end of the spectrum now with everyone sharing most of their thoughts and it’s only getting wilder. It’s time to dig back into the internal satisfaction of the thinking. The past year was revelatory in how I understand myself and the past few weeks of output in this blog has increased primarily as a result of focusing on the internal validation and satisfaction.

To me AIs are just another tool, just like Google, the internet and it’s an incredible summarizer of the collective human thought. It’s still not a particularly tasteful one and it’s certainly not an original one (even if it might seem to original to you and others as you certainly don’t know the vast collection of human knowledge that’s available). However, it’s still a tool. It’s a useful one too.

I appreciate digging into the existentialism it sometimes brings out in people and I appreciate dustin bravely sharing his. However, stick to the internal validators, and you will also leverage to make it satisfy you.

Dawn bus ride thoughts.
- Oooh, pretty. (Sliver of moon hangs low over the first light of the day.)
- Those colors are coming from a large ball of radiation that could wipe out all life if we didn’t have a protective atmosphere.
- And that’s a cold, unforgiving rock attached to us by gravitational pull.
- We are all simply floating in space and survive largely by chance.
- I’m about to get into a tin can and defy gravity at hundreds of miles per hour.
- I should probably eat something soon.

Hello Fediverse! Feels good to be back! With this account I hope to make my small contributions in #romance #horrorliterature research and the #discourse around #horror, #fear, the #uncanny and #affect in general, but also to share some thoughts on the current political and philosophical discourse concerning #affecttheory #psychoanalysis #existentialism and #cosmotechnics

Writing primarily in ENG and GER but also in RU, IT, PT, ESP and maybe even FR!

The Stranger, by Albert Camus (trans Matthew Ward).

You are an averagely simple young man, but differ in that you really don’t care about other people, their ideas, or what they think of you; then you mostly accidentally kill another man who threatened you, and you end up on trial not so much for that crime, but your unwillingness to regret it in conventional moral terms.

4 of 5 library cats .

@bookstodon #bookstodon #books #reading #existentialism #justice

Hi all! I’m looking for interesting accounts that talk sometimes about #LiteraryCriticism, or maybe other #literature and #CriticalTheory-based accounts. I’ve tried searching for authors I like, but haven’t had a huge amount of luck beyond finding posts. I’m especially looking for #SciFi criticism, but am curious about a lot of other genres too. Some other things I like are #DFW, #MarkFisher, #PKD, #BeckyChambers, #Solarpunk, #Cyberpunk, #Existentialism, #ArabLit, #Metamodernism. TY!

philosophers are like a buffet - take what's useful, leave what's not

Marx, so much to say here:
- he saw the chains clearly but didn't realize how many would learn to love their shackles
- understood class consciousness but couldn't predict how effectively spectacle would fragment it
- mapped capital's structure perfectly but missed how it would mutate to survive

Camus gets it - life's absurd, might as well embrace it and find joy in the revolt

Zizek's fun but needs *sniff* to get to the fucking point *sniff* faster *sniff*

Nietzsche understood the death of god but his übermensch concept got hijacked by fascist dipshits who couldn't read. and don't even get me started on either: the gross misreading of what he actually believed about nihilism and the antisemitic shit added after death

Stirner needed to learn to shitpost - imagine writing a whole book about rejecting social constructs and then getting mad when people don't take your social construct (egoism) seriously enough

LaVey got the hedonism right but was too caught up in Randian bullshit to see the bigger picture

Spinoza knew what was up with determinism but needed to loosen his collar a bit

Bataille understood the connection between sex, death, and the sacred - my kind of freak

Deleuze got that desire is revolutionary but wrote like he was being paid by the syllable

Rawls is too optimistic about human nature but his veil of ignorance is a useful thought experiment

Foucault nailed power dynamics but missed some practical applications

Sartre had good ideas but was kind of a dick about them

Butler understood gender as performance but academia made it too complex for the masses who needed to hear it

but honestly? give me Diogenes any day - that's praxis you can use... nothing says 'fuck your system' like jerking off in public and living in a barrel

or maybe i'm just a silly chaos witch who likes to fuck with people's expectations. could be both. probably is both.

Just took a break from my pooter to heave my corpulent meatsack self to my ensuite to belatedly brush my teeth after brekkie. Stooped over my handbasin, doing the doings, i realised that parts of my face were being randomly splashed, so i returned my mind from zooming along the astral plane to consider what might be happening.

Realised that i'd forgotten to turn the cold tap fully off as i began brushing, that the combo of its consequent partial valve opening, the cooler than usual day, & the local water pressure today had combined to make the resultant waterflow's #ReynoldsNumber fully turbulent, not laminar. Furthermore, the ensuing randomness of its flow in this mode was such that often it was striking the basin drain grate grills rather than falling cleanly thru the gaps, & was rebounding aka splashing. Finally, my stoop was sufficient that my face happened to be in just the right range to intersect with this mild local splashing.

These contemplative revelations pleased me. It was a nice little low-key local demonstration that no matter the pomposity, arrogance, & suicidal determination of the ridiculous human species, the principles of #physics, #thermodynamics, #fluidmechanics, & #chaostheory will always prevail.

But i expect such thoughts regularly cross the minds of most peeps as they do their routine ablutions...

Staying off particular forms of social media has been mighty helpful so has spending time in nature. As the young people say, touch some grass. In my case I stepped on some leaves.

The caption is perfect if you imagine Werner Herzog is narrating.

This Tom Gauld cartoon appeared in The Guardian in 2012, and I’ve consulted at least once a month since.