Camus called this kind of leap of faith 'philosophical suicide,' or what happens when the absurdity (meaninglessness) of existence is overwhelming, compelling one to resort to the pre-fabricated structure of religion or ideology to provide purpose and meaning. Once this is done, once a particular belief is locked in, the mind closes like a steel trap, and all further philosophical and theological inquiry is over. That leap of faith is philosophical suicide. Doing this offers an escape from the nagging doubts that everything we do is ultimately meaningless and the universe without purpose.

Pascal's Terror: Should We Fear the Eternal Silence of the Infinite Spaces?

Will we ever be free?

Sometimes I feel so sad — when I go to bed — I feel . . . just so relieved to become unconscious — it's like wanting to be dead.

Iris Murdoch, from The Philosopher’s Pupil

the good place dissertation please please please. just kidding i just wanted to rejoice in another person hating that show

it's so crazy to me because aside from a few aspects of the first season it's overwhelmingly bad, and everyone talks about it as if it was this amazing life changing piece of art. did we watch different shows or did saying the names of philosophers confuse people.

Once again this man hits me in the feels...

It's strange to me how comforting and familiar he feels sometimes. How much I miss this person I never even knew.

Then I find these little threads of connection and it all falls together.

This shirt was my late brother's, one of two similar ones we've kept, good memories came from these shirts. I remember the day he bought them, and we used to tease him for how outlandish they were but he would just smile and wear them twice as often! This one specifically really suited him.

And funny...Elvis very rarely wore green.

if demons and grimms are “godless” species then where did they come from?

They were still Created, just not by Auberon and Abaddon. Soft system I'm always tweaking but the ranking goes

- Major gods (Auberon/Abaddon)

- Minor gods (created by fallen scales of major gods)

Then at the bottom is

- Neo gods (Fictional gods & minor gods who lack sapience)

The Godless species, chimera/demons, grimms and werewolves are all created by minor gods but the circumstances are what class them as godless.

Grimms killed their minor God because they are staunchly anti religion and didn't want to fall into blind worship of their mother. Werewolves immmm still figuring out.

And chimera's minor God was never known, it wasn't sapient and wouldn't have been classed as a valid minor God if it was public and not limited to a specific catacomb. Need to tweak all this too but basically it Died and chimera emerged from the earth that they used to live under, horrifying the world ect. They're an extreme outlier in how species normally arrive to the world and speculations on where they came from run rampant, the most popular being the idea of a third major God who is responsible for all corruption in the world ect. Bc they don't have a God they also often create neo religions which is looked down upon.

Pretty much all the setting boils down to is if you have a bragging for existing and if the thing that made you can vouch for it. Chimera, grimm, werewolves and the ocean are considered physically Not part of the world as a whole because they either never had a creator in the worlds eye or have outright rejected the one they did have, or adopted a neo religion which is considered akin to rejecting the physical truth of the world. Ect

I hope that's coherent I'm literlsly about to enter the nap zone

lovely!

The Death of Cato, c 1640, by Matthias Stomer

Museo Civico al Castello Ursino - Catania, Sicily

Photos by Charles Reeza

I hope you will forgive me for having taken my life. I know you will disapprove. Only think it, if you can, a happier life for having terminated now.

Iris Murdoch, from The Philosopher’s Pupil

got snowed on and got slushed on but im still standing

All That You Are

You wake in the morning to find a man in the corner who wears your face. He is a tall, spindling man; a man with arms that stretch the width of the room and legs that fold him against the ceiling, a man of all sinew and bone. He leers down at you with your own mouth, pokes his tongue through the gap in your teeth. You (he) fell, once, long ago when you were a child tottering on a bicycle, swerved to avoid a stone and there you went tumbling grass-stained down the hill and into the street, lay bleeding from the mouth before swerving cars. You tell him get out and your voice comes smooth from his throat, reverberates in your ears through bone instead of air. You eat and it fills his stomach. You sleep and it rests his mind.

In the evening, you tell the man who wears your face a story. He is in the chair across from you, a plaid monstrosity from the roadside. You hauled it home, twenty and sweating and broke, left scratches up the stairwell and for months your apartment crawled with bedbugs, with cockroaches, with spiders, your body freckled with bites and sores. The scars gleam silver on the man who wears your face. This is not the story you tell.

The story you tell is this: you had a job once, some years ago — five, ten, fifty, you (he) know(s) there is no use accounting for such things — out in the desert, alone with no one around for miles and for weeks you stayed there sleepless, sweating under the spotlights as the creak of industrial fans wormed down, down into your mind so that you hear it now, still, even in silence; and you tell him of heat like the open door of an oven and of calluses down to bone. You tell him of clay taking form under your hands, and the whole time you tell it he draws in on himself, great sprawling limbs retreating towards the centre mass as your voice speaks from his mouth and yours from his.

You kill him, this man who wears your face, or perhaps he kills you. You reach out and touch him and he feels real, a prickle of goosebumps beneath your palm, the scratch of scars, the smooth prickle of hair. He is not so tall, now: his eyes meet your own. You feel over the surface of him in the stark white of your kitchen and he trembles under your touch. His (your) vocal chords stretch under his pleas, his (your) tongue flexes. A step backwards; the knife rests heavy in your (his) hand. Tears pool in your eyes, carve trails over your cheeks; your voice shreds raw 'til you taste iron on your tongue. A slash of the blade, a burst of red across your front. Your voice quiets to a gurgle; your mouth falls slack, your eyes stare up sightless from the floor.

You wake in the morning to find a man in the corner who wears your face.

morally ambiguous din djarin moment when he's about to close the deal🔫 and then suddenly realizes the person who is knelt in front of him waiting for the final blastershot actually is... the client - & took out a bounty on themselves as a way to end their own life

My friend shared this article about Robert Nozick's 'now in-famous thought experiment':

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's experiences?

My response:

"I remember reading somewhere that in order to keep living we must have some faith that life is good, that it has good things in store for us. I suspect that as life gets worse the appeal of the experience machine will only increase. Not just because pleasure is nice, but because (at least temporary) respite from pain is necessary. Cue the worn-out story of the rat park versus addiction (though I have no idea of its scientific credibility). "I also remember reading Brave New World at the peak of my adolescent depressive era and thinking, "Dystopia? I'll talk a shallow life of pleasure over whatever the fuck I'm in right now." I kept on living (obv) and at some point (no doubt after things improved somewhat) I decided to fight for a meaningful life rather than happiness or pleasure. I can't always choose for my life to be happy or pleasurable, but I can fight for it to be meaningful (although even that is not particularly stable ground c.f. absurdism)."

What I didn't include in my response, though I was tempted, was this David Foster Wallace passage on suicide (the ultimate form of escapism):

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

tobias animorphs......johnny outsiders....🤝🏻.......

Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract.

Émile Durkheim, from Suicide: A Study in Sociology, 1897

wow no idea what the answer to that question may be. i think it was something starting with m. moosygony? miso soup?