Laird to Leyla wrote:Leyla: (Jesus fucking Christ, God help meeeeee!)
Which I suppose is rational and well-reasoned discussion. Whereas, when it comes to my own rational and reasoned discussion, all you have to say is something peripheral from a movie, about truth (you've twice ignored my invitation to declare your own truth), and that:
Leyla Shen wrote:Everything excites the emotional part of his mind.
Getting exciteable and impatient about an error that someone else makes, is the sort of thing that happens when one is still struggling to abandon an attachment to those errors. The mind isn't quite smooth in its reasoning. It's just like a child that hasn't learnt to walk confidently yet. It'll come.
Leyla: Everything excites the emotional part of his mind.
Laird: Not quite: some things depress it.
If you mean emotional depression, that's still an "excitement" in the sense of an arousal.
Laird: I don't, though, deny that it exists, although I do have some measure of control over it. If I didn't, then I don't know how I would have survived this thread. I have quite a show-bag of trinkets: Kev's gifted me with arrogance, you've thrown a little accusation of misogyny at me, and Kelly has, quite ironically, dropped condescension into the mix.
These aren't revenge-based attacks, designed to cause unnecessary suffering. They're truths pointing out weaknesses in the same way that a group of engineers analyse weaknesses in a construction. The aim is to fix those weaknesses, which are only weaknesses relative to certain values.
If the CAD designs argued with the engineers, perhaps from feeling insecure, saying, "No, you're wrong, I'm perfectly strong", that would be arrogant. If the engineers responded by saying, "You claim to share our aims, but your current state is not matching those aims" that is not condescending.
Leyla: Actually, what I need to do is thoroughly disabuse myself of the idea that there is a necessary, mutually dependent relationship between physical age and wisdom.
Laird: And then disabuse yourself of the idea that you are immune from the above statement.
I don't think Leyla was arrogant enough to make such a statement without self-reflection.
That is why the Genius Forum is difficult -- it is not supposed to be for academic philosophy without personal ramifications. It's designed to eradicate hypocrisy, by making one highly conscious of the meaning of every claim and every personal statement, and never choosing to avoid that kind of self-examination.
If one attacks and criticises others, it is only effective if one's self-critique (conscience) is ten times more intense. That means one can criticise with intelligence.
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