Commissar Lauren said:
Tee hee.
I thought about giving my stance on what the self is and so forth, but decided against it. Some notes though:
The thing about skepticism and postmodernism is that they abolish themselves along with everything else. If nothing is certain, then it could be true that
everything is certain, which is obviously a paradox. But maybe that's not
really a paradox, and so on. Maybe I really have absolute knowledge of everything (after all I cannot be absolutely sure the opposite is true), but some circumstance prevents me from realizing this. But if that's the case, what do we mean by "know"? We intuitively know this is a misuse of the word, which is where postmodernism comes in. But if it's true that communication and reasoning is futile, then postmodernism has never been formulated either. If we want to have philosophy in the first place, logic and shared understanding must be taken as axiomatic. We also know intuitively that language is used precisely because it has communicative value and not because it represents some threat of confusion and delusion; those are just fallout that we can work to minimize. (This touches on the subject of Goedel's theorem and the popular misconception thereof that it somehow abolishes science or logic, but let's not go there.) Skepticism and deconstructionism may still have academical value (and "The Library of Babel" is one of the most ingenious texts ever), but let's leave them for the French, eh? In conclusion, logic > everything, because the alternative is defeatism and absurdity. I think Kant is pretty much on the spot here, and he predates stupid contemporary French intellectuals by centuries.
Anyone with a sense of humour can see that the
Principia Discordia is a total hoot. And I should know, I wrote it.
To pick Christianity for an "if we were all the same we would all be happy" tautology is ludicrous considering its bloody history; try Buddhism.
