Help me understand how being contentful can bring you peace in life.

For me being contentful now and not regretting any decisions in future is a paradox.

A newbie to stoicism and i can't wrap my head around the idea that materialistic desire are vise and you can't live a happy satisfied life. If any desire you have are vices than isn't desire of peace a vice too? Even if i am satisfied now but what guarantee can be there that it won't bringe me more pain in future. One example i can think of is being contentful of my financial situation now and a decade later regretting that when i don't have the money for my liver transplant that just failed.

And another question i have is shouldn't the purpose of life be just wanting peace why does it matter if it is achieved through materialistic means or you just leaving everything and staying in the woods. For example if a person finds peace travelling won't he/she use materialistic means to get peace.?.

I know i am all over the place but it's new for me so can't collect my thoughts properly :')

You are a series of continually dying entities.

Assumption(s) made for this concept: There is no soul and the brain creates consciousness.

Based on that assumption, each consciousness must arise somehow from the specific ways in which matter is arranged in the brain. My consciousness is different from your consciousness and I am not you simply because our brains are arranged in different states of consciousness. But if each arrangement of matter in a brain is its own consciousness (assuming it is a consciousness at all), then the You of yesterday is an entirely different consciousness from the You of today as your brains are different. The You of yesterday is not here anymore; thus, it is dead. In fact, this happens every moment as your brain updates and changes every moment. You may see yourself as something continuous, but you only just came into existence and you're about to- oops, you already died, but you don't know it. Instead there's another being conscious in your place which has your memories.

This is not just a metaphorical interpretation; this is a literal interpretation. If death is interpreted as the destruction of consciousness, something that calls itself "you" literally dies every moment and actually there is no true "you", just a constant illusion covered in death.

Thoughts?

Hi so I like to write a lot doing a lot writing on philosophical thoughts I have wanted a opinion on one: can humanity survive utopia? As we inch closer to harmless endless energy we get closer to a world without struggle, and can we survive that? Is it possible for the human mind to deal with paradise on earth? I think not honestly but willing hear counter arguments

Evolve, adapt, or repeat? The cycle is always present, but is it a cycle leading you to your highest vision? Nature shows us three states - creation, preservation, or destruction. The same states are found in the mind. Every thought or action creates a response, which looks like a continuation of the current and/or previous cycle. The pattern continues, until the cycle is improved upon or broken. The pattern is formed through habit, reputation, and reinforcement. The pattern continues on the way it has always has unless it is evolved or broken. This is what we call “fate”, and nothing more. Through the passage of time, we have the opportunity to create changes, so that we can consciously move forward as we please. The pattern begins with your thoughts and mind, whether you are conscious of the pattern or not it is always present. You may perpetuate the pattern, but we fail to see the truth when we internalize the patterns. We often mistake the consequences of the pattern, as who or what we are. Like will always follow like, there is no other way. Only through conscious awareness can the pattern evolve, and the pattern can take new form. Conscious change is difficult, it is much easier to remain on autopilot and do as we have always done. The real question, are you fulfilling your potential?

"The beauty of the world is the only thing that can be found in this life and the way it is. I am not sure what to do about the fact that life is not a real thing, but I think it is a good idea for us to be able to leave. We are not going to be here for much longer, but we will have plenty of time to get together"

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Hey, here is a though I have been having, it about art, and the "age old question" of what exactly it is, and this is definitely a relevant topic now with the emergence of freaky good ai art, the best of which isn't even popular at all right now by the way.
My thesis goes something like this: art Is everything that reaches for god. That's it...
I can go into detail of why I think that but with just this definition, how satisfactory do you find it?

Leibniz - On the problem of compound Monadological structures

I would like to open a discussion concerning various topics which can be seen as problematic in the philosophy of Leibniz and others

What Leibniz makes clear to us ( in Monadology) is that it is not at all clear why do particluars form structures. In fact its higly problematic when he assumes elementary, unperishing points called Monads (centers of activity and thought - which is here the same thing) We can clearly see this is a problem for Leibniz, because he is obliged to say two things. 1. Monads do not have windows, so they can’t be affected by other Monads. 2. (As a consequence) we have to postulate pre-established harmony to explain their coordination. For Leibniz, there is no other way he can explain it. So he does not know why there even exists this organization in the first place, which breaks his system, because he postulates in the first sentence of his Monadology that there in fact are compound structures, from which (he claims) we see that there have to some elementary particles. I do not think there has been any progress on this question down to our time from the pre-socratics. Leibniz is bold enough to assume pluralism of substances having a value of it’s own. Pre-socratics dissolved particulars in something general. They had to explain particulars by Necessity, becuase it simply mattered very little- it did not become a problem for them. Leibnize’s first postulate in Monadology serves a summary to ancient physics. They asked HOW it happens that compound composed of something elementary and unchanging. It was a mechanical question. Now Platón and Aristotle wanted to know WHY it happens in the first place. For they adhered to Anaxagoras and his concept of Nous, which is Leibnize’s pre-established harmony. Till this day it is still a question HOW it happens. For physics found laws governing formations of structures. But WHY elementary particles should be tuned to each other, WHY they are even made to go further, and not simply stay what they are ,is still a mystery. It should be remembered that Leukippos was much further than modern science. Because he knew that given atoms and empty space, they will just stay that way forever. So he postulated Necessity, as every bad philosophy does. He didn’t know why, so he said it must be so. I think Democritus hit on that too, se they adhered to Necessity- it has to be like this. This is an aswer constsntly re-affirmed by quantum physics. It’s trying to pin down a mechanism which could explain HOW are particles constitueted to form structures. But the real question is WHY should there be something unchanging forming something changeable, and what prones this formation have not been even properly asked. I see it only in Leibniz, but he does not say it explicitly

I will happily enter into further discussion, feel free to attack whatever statement you feel uncomfortable with. This is not a argumentatively coherent thesis, I simply do not understand it and want to have a better grasp of it.

The Tragic Worthlessness of War:

Watching the world these days might make one think the belief in war to be modern. In contrast these words: war, fighting and conflict have always existed as part of the human way. Might war be not the way of thugs but the way of mankind itself? Is being human in the end the same thing as being a creature of war?
Why? For war has no winner. No people in the history of man has ever won a war. How can one tell the mother of a dead soldier the war has been won? Can someone tell me who the winner is? Is it society, having to deal with the grief, destruction and blood that mankind leaves behind itself? Is it the country having lost a generation of men? Is it the King the throne of whom is made of blood and bones? The king who in the end dies as worthless a death himself.
Sun Tzu left the last chapter out, when he wrote what would become "The Art of War". He left out the part telling us there is no art to war. There is only the bodies of men, women and children, being fed to the meatgrinder that is the human existence.
"Only the dead have seen the end of war" - George Santayana

“We are trapped in our bodies and our conscious.” Discuss

The statement is indifferent as to the question of whether this is good or bad.

How often do you ask yourself,”how did I get here?” Let me make clear that when I say “here” I do not mean the dimly lit room of a pale puke green hue decorated with sloppily drilled and now barren holes scattered across its four walls that I find myself surrounded by now as I write this.When I say “here”I mean to describe the indescribable and inescapable settings we have perceived since our birth. Not only the observable and physical settings, but the setting in which our consciousness finds itself imprisoned within the medium of the physical realm. It begs the question, in my opinion, of whether or not we “got” here so to speak, or if we’ve been here in some sense all along.

The most simple, beautiful, terrifying, yet reasonable answer to give when asked what is it like after we die is certainly that it is much like it was before we were born. This rationalization is based on the belief that there was no experience or observations before our birth. But how far back can you really remember? There is most likely much of your early life that you have no recollection of. This means although you certainly did exist, you have no current access to the experiences and observations you made during those early years of your life. In that same sense is it not possible that you have existed in some form before the event of birth and have no current access to the experiences you made beyond what limited span of memory you can reflect on? The only thing we can know for certain is that we exist, and the only thing we have come to learn is that we know little to nothing at all about the nature of our existence. People often search for meaning to go along with our disposition of self awareness, although nothing suggests in my opinion that any meaning is necessary to explain how our existence came to be. If you believe in god in a religious sense and that some all knowing supreme entity existed before us and created our reality with human kind as its ultimate objective. Where did god come from and how long and aimlessly did they exist before proposing this occupation? Of what framework did they conceive the image of humanity without a physical form themselves? And if our creation was in their own image, who created the image in which they meant to replicate? By this frame of thought you can understand my confusion that anyone amongst us could believe that any answers offered by religious belief are sufficient in explaining anything at all beyond what we all already know… That all we know is that we are to ask, so do not stop asking why we are at all 🙏☀️🌙🌏

If duality were solved mathematically then it would be a science. If duality were a science, it would be relativity because it explains all reality. Duality is intrinsic knowledge that’s simple and broad and pertains to all things.

Contemporary framings of the liar paradox do not actually pose a problem. The sentence "This sentence is false." does not refer to anything, because the only thing it can be considered to refer to is its own falsehood and it cannot refer to its own falsehood because that would be begging the question. Thus, it is just a void and nonsensical string of words.

If evil vanished completely, might goodness continue to be good?

For example, do the good ones come in a ranking within themselves? Thus will the good -at the bottom- be bad compared to the others?
Must there be evil for there to be goodness? Or, is there no evil when there is only good?

Consciousness is the assumption that because we in the state of mind where we can acknowledge, respond and interpret our surroundings. But how do we determine that’s consciousness. Our brain never sleep always active. When we are asleep It uses memories and the surroundings to create dreams. I think the brain action does not necessarily indicative of the wake or sleep mode. Just like you only know it’s a dream when you are consciously in the wake mood. But does it make a difference to the brain. The brain is active regardless.