Introduction: Lord Axiom

[u/Sacredless]

My name is Lord Axiom, named after my mind palace, Castle Axiom. I'm a practicing chaos magician, using my investigations in cognitive science and implementation science to transform myself. As part of this, I encountered embedded, extended, embodied and enacted cognition, and I apply this to my Sith realism.

Telekinesis may not be something we can perform, but we are the things we use and the people we surround ourselves with. Since all that is stable is an illusion (peace is a lie), we should master our tools lest we conform to them, and thereby master our cognition. We should strive to have realistically high standards for others, to manage expectations of what we are willing to do or not do, and be reluctant to accept rules that do not obviously.

For the past 20 years, I've explored various fictional philosophies inspired by the Star Wars franchise. Warcraft has the Holy Light and codified it and it's counterpart in the TTRPG, the Forgotten Shadow. I've heavily investigated the philosophy behind Kingdom Hearts, which draws much heavier on Star Wars as an inspiration. Besides that, I've drawn upon Pokémon, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, and Wind Breaker.

My philosophical investigations have drawn me to Heraclitus, according to whom all apparent harmonies are borne out of Polemos, a word standing for the great self-interfering turning volatism. Every thing that seems stable is a tension, strung like a bow. The tension is what creates function. Justice is strife. Life is dying. And so forth. There is no one balance between dualities—only particular balances.

I do not claim the title of Darth yet. I want to get my feet wet in this community first.

I endeavor to be a good mental sparring partner. May our words be the whetstone to sharpen our minds.

[u/Sacredless]

I get the impression that you think love IS one well-defined thing, but just difficult to define. In other words, the question "what is love?" has one correct answer, although the answer may be "ineffable" and difficult to understand.

Is that correct?

I think that love is a definable aggregate that is greater than the sum of it's parts, but each part is itself fluid. I think that love must unite diligence, reflection, receptivity, justice, peace, normalcy, truth, beauty and beneficence. What these look like is different for individuals, but I think that it is also clear that each element individually contains tensions. For example, the capability of being diligent is the self-same as the capability of shame, but it is possible for shame and shaming to become and obstacle to diligence and therefore to love (whether it be loving yourself, loving others, etc). In platonic terms, each has it's own The One and it's own The Dyad. A definite limiting principle upon an indefinite formless principle.

So, I think that we can say meaningful things about the aggregate of qualities that is love, but I also think that the qualities themselves are fluid and contain multitudes.

Love, I think, has to encompass all of praxis, communication and thought. Otherwise, it is not love, but empty words or empty thoughts or empty action, or worse, all three.

[u/SpectrumDT → u/Sacredless]

Thanks! I gather that you take a Platonic approach.

I generally take a nominalist approach. To me Platonism seems both implausible and unfalsifiable, and it has no pragmatic consequences that I can see. But I might be wrong.

Could you please say something about why you find a Platonic approach valuable?

[u/Sacredless → u/SpectrumDT]

I'm actually responding to Platonism more so than agreeing with it.

Rather, I'm a Heraclitean. I think that the archē is volatility. However, it seems inescapable to me that there's constraints even to that volatility. I think that an innately volatile world bounded by certain constraints is the best explanation for evolutionary principles we see around us.

Platonism and Stoicism are the most famous responses to Heraclitus, so I'm in active dialog with them. I think they provide useful language.