11–20 of 29 posts
I sing as the bird sings, That on the bough alights, The song that from me springs, Is pay that well requites.
From the Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner. An obscure but amazingly original work - published the year Nietzsche was born!
Generally, Karma in the popular sense.
I'm not saying you have to have a good answer, I'm just curious. The fact that you are quite specific about what guides your life yet are quick to act in opposition to that is somewhat intriguing.
i would approach philosophy no different than physics. There are "spiritual laws" (philosophical?) that govern human mental state, and help understand it better. Buddhism tries to conceptualize this as much as possible.
personally i believe we should only depend on the "truths" or "laws of nature" either physical or meta, that we humans were able to figure out so far...like physics laws, spirutual laws "karma" etc.
cause and effect, scientific discovery etc.
I'm a practicing muslim, so that excludes materialism, although it doesn't say much else.
I believe in free will, in the sense that at the core, we have the freedom to choose, even if we can't act on our choices or carry them out due to external (or even internal) factors.
Following some wikipedia links, this might have a name: "dualism". But I won't claim that I'm a "dualist" or anything like that.
I essentially believe that awareness and feelings are not reducible to materialistic phenomenon. That computers will never have human-like awareness; they will never experience pain or joy the way humans do. And that awareness has nothing to do with computational capacity, and it's ultimately meta-physical.
EDIT: Reading the wikipedia article on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind), I like what I'm reading and find that it agrees to my beliefs in a lot of ways.
To quote a quote:
if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. —J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds, page 209
Existentialism, Agnosticism, Stoicism. I find these three fit very nicely together.
I also believe very strongly in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-ownership and adhere to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
And everyone derives meaning or utility from it in different ways. Everyone is like their own program in the system (just like the "The Matrix").
Winners in life tend to be naturally stubborn existentialists though.
One of my most favorite movie scenes of all time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaJPNrf1DPY