Existentialism anyone?

[Papus79]

To maybe give a more concise description of why I'm territorial about completing my read and study of IDM:

It's a sort of Rappaport 'steelmanning' of certain conclusions that I've been coming to in a much more elaborate and detailed manner. I want to utilize IDM to sort out where I agree, where I disagree, where I learn something by reading it, where some of the analogies made are either strong or damaging to the case for IDM, ie. this is a sort of competence-building gym for the given topic at hand - ie. studying and resolving something like three somewhat related but different frames that could fit on the situation: relationship-prime OSR, dual-action monism, and neutral monism. It will be just as interesting to me if IDM holds under scrutiny and it edifies one, two, or all of the above as it does if it collapses - ie. in the later case I get to know, for myself - deeply and intimately - why it is that it collapses.

From that perspective I don't think we're going to bomb ourselves to the stone age in the next few years, and while Covid could go full 12 Monkeys I'm getting the sense that the vaccines that are being created right now effectively pull its teeth - ie. high vaccination rate = no more Covid. From that perspective I feel comfortable in saying that my time horizon for organizing my own understandings of these things as adequately as I'd like isn't in enough jeopardy that I should take leaps of faith, or leaps of authority, to try re-drawing my frames from scratch. Completing a study of IDM will most likely give me more genuine passion about a different set of questions - and Husserl et al may very well hold the keys to those questions. Without having those questions as being of high value to me - what I'd actually get out of reading phenomenology will be significantly less because I won't have as much of a structure prepared to dock the most important points into.

[Hereandnow]

You may be right about that. Best of Luck.

[Fellowmater]

Existentialism is (I'll try here, there are as many brands of existentialism as there are existentialists) the basic idea that our existence precedes our essence.

Allow me to explain. we exist. fact. whether or not the world we experience is real (as philosophers argue all too often) matters not, it is the world we experience, and therefore we must face it. this world, and ourselves and everyone in it, exist with no meaning. the "meaning to life" is that there is no "meaning to life" outside of what an individual attaches to it.

Our will is totally free, and in that freedom we dispair. it is not just a freedom to "do as I damn well please" but freedom to define your world and everything in it, because nothing else has, can, or will. your reality lacks meaning (the void) and you are alone in this void, and while you can attempt to ascribe meaning to it, you'll never fully succeed.

Another idea behind it is the ever-burning knowledge that our minds could live forever if only our bodies could support it. our minds are eternal in scope, yet mortal in reality, and this knowledge throws our lives into "despair" as we begin to realize we cannot affect our reality outside of ourselves, and we cease to exist, so does our reality.

Its a rather lonely, melancholy philosophy, though some people take it up with a fever (Sartre) and look to it as an almost blessing to be totally free, while others think humanity simply wishes to not be free (Dostoevsky sp?) and will give away our freedom to define our world at any opportunity we get.

[fionaimmodest]

The defining tenant of existentialism is the belief that existence, the being of a person, precedes the essence or nature of a person. In other words, there is no human nature. This sounds like the blank slate interpretation of human nature.

Is this proposition really true; can it be verified; or is this just another attempt to escape the firm clutches of determinism?