/edu/ - Education

>>1303
I would pay money for this image to be painted over to have a bunker in it instead of a house.

There is something paradoxical about the oft repeated view from philosophers that the universe is meaningless while humans want to find meaning in life. It's more like the universe is full of meaning for us and we are helpless to escape it even in the case we want to. We fundamentally can't escape the fact that some things make us happy and some things make us suffer, which itself brings a kind of meaning to life. Also there seems to be a surplus of meaning where things take on more meaning than just their apparent consequences for our simple pleasure or pain. People find more happiness in cooking than simply the pleasure of the food they eventually eat. This is true generally of labour; you get a flow and joy from building a desk that can't be reduced to the utility of using the desk. Heroic actions take on more meaning than the benefits they actually provide, and so on. This surplus meaning might be considered the sublime. This is why utilitarianism is flawed, or at least would involve much more complicated 'computations' than might first appear.

Morality is a natural consequence of this surplus of meaning. Children have a strong sense of fairness and want to share candy that are unequally distributed for example. The point is not that there will be some practical problem from the unequal distribution (no child will starve because of not having a few sweets) but the justice of the situation. Humans naturally have concepts of justice and so on which are the foundation of morality. There can be different conceptions of morality depending on the society that one lives in, and it is illuminating to challenge a certain morality sometimes, but the existence of morality is pretty much inherent in humans. Trying to get people to 'awaken from the illusion of morality' altogether is autistic and not helpful.

To be honest, the impossibility of the universe existing, being coherent, and strange beings like us existing and leading lives full of the peculiar meanings of human life, suggest to me the existence of God or some kind of judgement, but of course no one truly knows this.

>>2437
What do you mean with impossibbility in the last paragraph? Is it poetic language or do you mean highly improbable?

>>1303
>What is morality to you?
first and foremost, a mental program, much like language or facial recognition, that evolved to allow us to recognize the best people to cooperate with, and to make us behave in a way that also allow others to recognize us as good cooperation partners. That mental program goal seem to be to optimize opportunity cost decisions.

But that's only the biological basis of the concept. Humans are capable of complex and deliberate thought process, that can either be used to justify moral intuitions, or to change them (or simply ignore them in the decision). Society at large also codify moral rules, that can overlap with our intuitions, but also go contradictory to them.

If you're interested in that "evolutionary psychology" angle, I recommend this youtube serie which made me discover the theory, it has english subtitle available :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jkIONNqBcg&list=PL8mPrvnM78yJ78OqgF4xtvJyOvJTeWjiz

>Do you think at the end of your life you will be judged by a god for your actions?
lol no


>>2277
>Problems like the trolley question where you choose to save either 3 people and kill 5 or save 5 people and kill 3. Morality is worthless in your decision making.
that's absolutely false, unless you claim to always make the utilitarianism choice in these problems (and then you'd be a monster)

God will be put on trial, not me.

>>5366
capital isn't about philosophy

>>5371
I've often heard Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness is basically what Marx would've wrote had he stuck with philosophy.

Not the German ideology. Its bullshit

>>5372
Link
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs3.htm

>>5373
Unrelated, but I watched a Video about the German Ideology some time ago and there was this one Guy in the Comments who just insisted that it was the Jewish Ideology instead. I found pretty pathetic, but also funny

>>5282
Falun Gong is an arm of the imperialists and funded by the CIA, I do understand why they say what they say.
Freud, and psychoanalysis in general, on the other hand, is being repressed in imperialist society by faithful shock troopers such as you, except where they can use it to control us and sell us products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

>>5282
the difference is that PsychoAnalysis isn’t an ethical doctrine. Cults are.

>>5255
>There's nothing yet with which I particularly strongly disagree.
You agree that people have perfect memory within them? You agree that telepathy is a real thing?

>>5292
Show me where in this text Freud implies either of those.

https://tv.leftypol.org/r/streaming
About to go live reading the last chapters.

>>5353
Im so dumb, it literally says Rudolph was part of the victims of communism foundation

Why did you even want to read those books in the first place?

>>5355
To discredit them? I was talking to someone and they mentioned these people.

>>5308
ah the early 2010s good times

>>5280
>>Be once in a millennia genius
This is correct

>>5280
objectively a shit take. Communism is the cult of the idea man

>>5312
Explain

>>5312
There's no "take", it's a shitpost bro

>>670
>What is your favorite book?
El reino de este mundo by Alejo Carpentier, its beautifully written. Don Quijote is a great novel too.
>What book influenced you the most?
Capital. It was incredibly clarifying.
>What do you like about books?
Books can be an escape, I started out reading fantasy, "graduated" to science-fiction, and came back to fantasy with LOTR and ASOIAF. Books can educate you, they can help you become a master of any field. Books can make you think in new ways, exploring reality in ways you could have never imagined. Books are the congealed form of human imagination and experience.
>What are you planning to read?
The Visible and the Invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
>What are you reading now?
In Defense of Lost Causes by Zizek. I'm in part 2 and despite its deficiency of organization I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.

>>670

>What is your favorite book?
An Alchemy Of The Mind by Dianne Ackerman

>What book influenced you the most?
Rule By Secrecy by Jim Marrs. It's a conspiracy theory book that I picked up in middle school.
It kind of wasted my time and mental energy, because I was constantly looking for confirmations and contradictions to what he said everywhere, but it turns out that that's kind of a never-ending pursuit, and it's unfruitful, and there probably aren't aliens using humans to fight proxy wars or whatever the fuck that book was trying to get me to believe.
It was an influential book because it ruined my intellect and wasted my time and ruined my life, drugs are probably safer.

>What do you like about books?
They change your mental state and are rewarding to read. I can go back to sleep if I drank too much the night before, or I can let the sunrise of being entranced yet awake dissipate the mental fog obstructing my perception of my imagination.
And if they're paperbacks, they're soft. unf

>what are you planning to read?
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>670
>What is your favorite book?
Don't really have one so much, although Brothers Karazamov, Death of Ivan Ilyich, Checkov's short stories, Pessoa and Saramago I enjoyed it a lot.
>What book influenced you the most?
I'm poortuguese, so "Levantado do Chão" (roughly translates to "Risen from the ground") by José Saramago. Unironically was a novel that turned me into a convicted socialist and later Marxist and believing in a revolutionary methodology.
>What do you like about books?
It's a very uniquely useful way for an autist like me to understand other humans if it's fiction. They have a lot of information to help me understand things in non-fiction.
>what are you planning to read?
Currently reading Capital and other Marxist. Will continue to do that as well as some philosophy and psychoanalysis, and more canon Portuguese language authors like Eça de Qeuirós atm.
>what are you planning to read?
Other than what I've already said above, Cidade e as Serras, by Eça de Queirós.

>>5302
*>>what are you reading now?
Other than what I've already said above, Cidade e as Serras, by Eça de Queirós, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and Casa-Grande & Senzala by Gilberto Freyre.

>What is your favorite book?
Not sure, maybe Dune for fiction, Blackshirts & Reds for nonfiction. Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom is quite good as well.
>What book influenced you the most?
Communist Manifesto most likely.
>What do you like about books?
Learning, and feels better than watching YouTube or TV.
>What are you planning to read.
Finishing up the Dune series, and taking up Capital.
>What are you reading now?
God Emperor of Dune and Capital Volume 1.

try /dead/ maybe

>>5332
It's more useful to ask here.

>>5329
You'll have better luck over here:
http://hbovvpi5bursxxga7excdp6axzf3zna3gy2pgvmlobrd5pqxj6sq2zad.onion/dead/catalog.html

>>5277
But the difference is that the rights you surrender are legal fiction while your computer is material reality. See the post above yours.

>>5286
your ISP threatening to blacklist you and withhold service is also material reality

>>5237
>Gavin Mueller
In a recent interview he compares the FOSS movement to the Luddite movement. While this is a take I've never heard before, the more I think about it the more it makes sense. https://novaramedia.com/2021/03/26/luddites-hackers-saboteurs/

>>5316
Apparently Johan Söderberg shared similar sentiments in his 2008 book, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement and later from Mueller's colleague, Maxigas in the Journal of Peer Production. Both are/were associated with the P2P Foundation.

So in the end is an free culture still worth fighting for?

thunderf00t has some cringe content but he also does important work debunking dumb futurist meme tech
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQJW3WMsx1q0js6FvjO89H62m60SoHdE6

>>5325
for history I like Military History Visualized
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK09g6gYGMvU-0x1VCF1hgA

>>5179
This is essentially the question of how to get zoomers to understand their brains and their minds have been shattered by a universe of superfluous approaches to anything even slightly intellectual and constant flashing lights designed to distract them, and also how to help them break that cycle of distraction and start toughening their minds up to be able to handle anything more complex. Whether the topic is socialism or any other, watching youtube videos or streams is and always be an inadequate substitute for the real intellectual and mental nourishment found in books. I mean, really, the only meaningful course of action would be to find a way to help them improve their lives in general unironically. This can't be done over the internet. So, maybe approach zoomers in real life and try to impact their lives?!?
The fundamental fact about this kind of zoomer is that they HAVE to believe watching Vaush or Shaun or even listening to Chapo (as clear and straightforwardly as they present their content as purely entertainment), because reading for them is genuinely harder than for anyone who already has built that habit or just isn't stuck in the whirlwind of ADHD internet content! And, also important to remember is that reading probably it's gonna seem even harder than it really is before they actually do it, cause the human brain naturally recoils at being challenged to do something harder than it is accustomed to. Plus, many of them will have been presented with an exaggerated estimation of how hard reading actually is their whole lives, or at least have created that estimation for themselves in order to have an excuse to not do it.
Finally, it's good to regard that reading doesn't mean you have to read every volume of Capital (although the first is pretty mandatory IMO), all of Althusser's work, along with all of Cockshott, Hegel, Lenin, and all of Zizek and Chomsky to boot. Only some people will have that much interest and motivation, but really reading Capital Vol1 shouldn't be built up like some fuckin Everest only to be climbed by big-brains, it's really not that hard really.

>>5267
>The fundamental fact about this kind of zoomer is that they HAVE to believe watching Vaush or Shaun or even listening to Chapo (as clear and straightforwardly as they present their content as purely entertainment)

Meant: HAVE to believe watching Vaush or Shaun or even listening to Chapo (as clear and straightforwardly as they present their content as purely entertainment) is an appropriate substitute for reading actual theory because reading for them is genuinely harder than for anyone who already has built that habit or just isn't stuck in the whirlwind of ADHD internet content!

>And, also important to remember is that reading probably it's gonna seem even harder than it really is before they actually do it

Meant: reading is gonna seem even harder than it really is, TO THEM before they actually do it

I'm building on the premise of interpolation.

We've all been raising under Capitalism and have, as a result, had the profit motive deeply ingrained into us. Here I slightly part from rigid marxist line, and say that the profit motive here isn't only economic; it's also libidinal, psychological. The question one asks once they look at a book is, is it worth it? Even if they know, and admit in conversation that they should read it, they won't. To appropriate a Marx qoute "they don't know it, but they're doing it" one could argue today, in a different context, that they do know, yet they're still not doing it. How do we get people to read, I think good videos do inspire the viewer to want to learn. It's somehow getting them to take the "plunge" which seems to be the insurmountable task.

>>5179

Tell them that many of the key ideas of the books are already discussed in the internet, thus, making it easier for them to catch up. For example, telling them to take their time to learn some important economic concepts instead of diving right into Das Kapital; showing them what they'll encounter in a certain book; just preparation in general, makes it easier for them.

>>5267
This is why starting them on a beginner text is good
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm