Philosophy, fandom and football

[fruitvilla]

1 minute ago, Spoony said:

Ultimately these two are proud Argentinians.

Funny thing pride ... 

I was born in Canada ... nothing to do with me. No reason to be proud of being born somewhere.
Moved to Birmingham when I was less than a year old .... again nothing to do with me
Lucky I happened to see Villa at Villa Park before St Andrews
Grew up and was educated in Birmingham. Again did not have much choice in that either
English was not my first language, (I could say the same of many native speaking Brummies too). Not much choice there either
Did reasonably well at school ... I was lucky, I had parents that pushed me, and was lucky my nutrition, genes and environment allowed me to flourish.
Married to the same wife for forty five years,  my hormones kicked in at uni and never looked back.
I was lucky, I chose a career that took me to Africa and North America that allowed me to see the hotels, conference halls and mining facilities in many parts of the world.

All this and much, much more has been luck.

What exactly is this pride thing?

[fruitvilla]

5 hours ago, Genie said:

Born in Canada to parents who are Romanian and Chinese.

Claiming her as a Brit is a bit flakey isn’t it? 

This is a deep philosophical question. Growing up in Brum, drinking all that Welsh water, I suspect there are some Welsh molecules in me still.

I feel part Welsh.

Edited September 12, 2021 by fruitvilla

[chrisp65]

15 hours ago, fruitvilla said:

This is a deep philosophical question. Growing up in Brum, drinking all that Welsh water, I suspect there are some Welsh molecules in me still.

I feel part Welsh.

Are you size XL or less and are you prepared to play friendlies?

Answer yes to both questions and you’re on the plane.

 

[fruitvilla]

On 19/09/2021 at 04:02, TRO said:

We was Lucky....

• Lucky to have Bailey
• Lucky to have a partisan crowd
• Lucky to have a tactically aware manager
• Lucky to have a miserly back line to keep a clean sheet.

yes I guess we were Lucky.

I know this is tongue-in-cheek and you are being facetious, but yes it is luck.

 

[TRO]

1 hour ago, fruitvilla said:

I know this is tongue-in-cheek and you are being facetious, but yes it is luck.

 

It was reverse psychology or currently known as Strategic Self-Anticonformity. 

colloquially known as taking the p***

[fruitvilla]

11 minutes ago, villalad21 said:

I have no idea

I was going to make a joke out of this saying, again I agree with you. But on a more philosophical note this is in large part because the universe is fundamentally chaotic. So it is difficult to predict how a team will play. This is in part the opposition is also unpredictable as are the the match officials. Each moment in a game is to a large degree unpredictable. And each moment affects the next. We can maybe assess the probabilities but there is always a finite probability an undesired result will occur. 

I am cultivating a relaxed approach to life and seeing it through claret and blue specs.

[fruitvilla]

2 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

as Smith never wanted to beat his mate.

It is one thing to have a theory of mind ... but this just boggles my mind.

[PussEKatt]

On 15/10/2021 at 01:57, fruitvilla said:

I was going to make a joke out of this saying, again I agree with you. But on a more philosophical note this is in large part because the universe is fundamentally chaotic. So it is difficult to predict how a team will play. This is in part the opposition is also unpredictable as are the the match officials. Each moment in a game is to a large degree unpredictable.

Not much unpredictablity in darts.

[MakemineVanilla]

On 29/08/2021 at 20:49, fruitvilla said:

Funny thing pride ... 

I was born in Canada ... nothing to do with me. No reason to be proud of being born somewhere.
Moved to Birmingham when I was less than a year old .... again nothing to do with me
Lucky I happened to see Villa at Villa Park before St Andrews
Grew up and was educated in Birmingham. Again did not have much choice in that either
English was not my first language, (I could say the same of many native speaking Brummies too). Not much choice there either
Did reasonably well at school ... I was lucky, I had parents that pushed me, and was lucky my nutrition, genes and environment allowed me to flourish.
Married to the same wife for forty five years,  my hormones kicked in at uni and never looked back.
I was lucky, I chose a career that took me to Africa and North America that allowed me to see the hotels, conference halls and mining facilities in many parts of the world.

All this and much, much more has been luck.

What exactly is this pride thing?

Very interesting.

One of the questions I always wonder about, is whether people ever make real choices in life, and whether our path is more or less predestined by circumstances and our inbred personal propensities.

If true, we cannot be rightfully praised or blamed for any outcome.

[fruitvilla]

17 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

One of the questions I always wonder about, is whether people ever make real choices in life, and whether our path is more or less predestined by circumstances and our inbred personal propensities.

If true, we cannot be rightfully praised or blamed for any outcome.

whether people ever make real choices This is one of my favourite topics. For deeper discussions some definitions (real, choice) may be in order, but that's for another time. This "wondering" leads off in many directions ... nature of the universe, morality, effective judiciary, the self, religion. But It would be foolish, to think we make choices etc in isolation of our surroundings and biology. 

we cannot be rightfully praised or blamed Perhaps? I think we can say we like and dislike actions of others or even ourselves. We can blame the tsunami of 2004 on 200 000 deaths? But could it have been otherwise?

This is why sometimes I find VillaTalk deeply frustrating. But then it is just a microcosm of life I see in the the rest of the world.

[mjmooney]

We have no free will. But we must act as if we do. We have no choice. 

[fruitvilla]

Just now, mjmooney said:

We have no free will. But we must act as if we do. We have no choice. 

I think the illusion of free will comes from a deep and necessary ignorance of our inner workings. 

[MakemineVanilla]

I suppose the real proof as to whether we actually believe in the absence of freewill, is whether we act as though we do when other people do bad things.

Claiming that we lack freewill does seem to let ourselves off the hook, with regard to our own moral agency, but are we so philosophical when we confront the evil deeds of someone else?

Edited December 30, 2021 by MakemineVanilla

[fruitvilla]

23 hours ago, MakemineVanilla said:

I suppose the real proof

I suspect the concept of proof is dodgy concept outside igniting gun powder and alcohol. Perhaps in a law court, but that's dodgy too.

23 hours ago, MakemineVanilla said:

whether we actually believe in the absence of freewill, is whether we act as though we do when other people do bad things.

Not sure  ... I am not afraid of shadows but an unexpected one could make me jump.  So my instinctual reaction to a bad act could be very different from my reasoned one.

23 hours ago, MakemineVanilla said:

Claiming that we lack freewill does seem to let ourselves off the hook

Disagree strongly, even with respect to a moral agency.  Doing a a so-called bad act will have repercussions. 

23 hours ago, MakemineVanilla said:

with regard to our own moral agency,

If we don't have free will, then all this morality stuff is bit of an illusion, is it not? I am not denying I have a sense of morality nor I deny that I have a sense of colour, but I understand enough to see  there are no "yellow" photons leaving the emoji. Like colour there is an illusory nature to morality.

23 hours ago, MakemineVanilla said:

but are we so philosophical when we confront the evil deeds of someone else?

Plainly not ... or at least not most of us, most of the time. I suppose it depends on how much people have thought about it, ie the philosophy around choice.

[fruitvilla]

50 minutes ago, villalad21 said:

You make your own luck in football

Many people believe this kind of stuff. Somehow, some believe we are Gods of our Destiny.  I don't think this is so much a result of faulty thinking, but more of a lack of thought.

[fruitvilla]

11 hours ago, A'Villan said:

This notion that we are this inconsequential blob of matter that are strangers in a universe so large, helpless to the whims and ways of the world, well it hurts me that we see it so. It hurts because I am inclined to think that this mentality is planted in us by design to divorce us from what's true.

In part we are inconsequential, but then as far as we can tell we are unique. As Sagan suggested we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. 

11 hours ago, A'Villan said:

I think there's an important and perhaps even urgent need for people to at the very least explore what makes us who we are a little deeper than just handing it over to a scientific method and those dedicated to it. 

Well if by excluding scientific method we give up on error checking our theses then I can be counted out. If we want to have descriptions of human endeavours and we wish them to be accurate, then I can't help but think these descriptions must be coherent with the descriptions of our underlying substrate. Don't you?

11 hours ago, A'Villan said:

Take the initiative for yourself. Maybe that's why we find ourselves thinking it's all left to chance, because we have forgotten how to take it upon ourselves to think creative, critical and self determine.

Ahh! You want to be like the English, self made men thereby relieving God of an almighty responsibility. If indeed we do indeed have a sense of self determination, surely that sense is predicated on having a profound lack of awareness of our inner workings. 

11 hours ago, A'Villan said:

The acknowledgement of a lack of knowledge is when we can begin to wonder and develop as there is room for learning to take hold. If the only room you have in that wonderful world of yours is to accept scientific facts, I think you've sold yourself well and truly short.

Oh I don't think I am selling myself short. But I do realize I am extremely lucky. I saw Villa before I saw the Blues. Am I responsible for the configuration of my DNA? Am I responsible for who my parents were, which school I went to, who my friends ended up being? In what way am I responsible for the hormones that kicked  in which resulted in me marrying my wife of 45 years? 

The stories I tell of my life, to be accurate, I think need to be coherent with the underlying, biology, chemistry and physics. If they are not then our stories may as well be fairy tales. I don't think I am selling myself short or long, but coherently. But I agree with you on the knowledge side of things. I consider myself a devout agnostic, but I do go where the evidence takes me. I have to.

Thank you for your thoughtful and careful response.

I replied here not to sully the History thread.

[fruitvilla]

Quote

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Courtesy of Douglas Adams' Zaphod.

There is a lot of talk of people's ego. And I can't help we talk a lot of nonsense about it. We have a theory of mind (ToM) and we apply it to others to explain what the motivation for doing stuff, what the underlying causation for what we (I) do. In reality that causation is a whole bunch of electrobiochemistry going on in the brain that is informed/activated by nerve cells from our sense organs.

So when we say something like Gerrard did something because of his ego, we are talking nonsense.

[fruitvilla]

57 minutes ago, Ingram85 said:

If we played well, battled every match but ultimately lost every match unluckily and got relegated is that still good enough for you?

This type of post I think displays nicely the lack of understanding of the properties of the universe.

Fundamentally the universe is chaotic (and here I use the scientific sense of the word chaotic). Everything is luck! Regardless of whether one deems it good enough. 

There's so much bollocks on the Gerrard thread (for and against) that it has ceased to be funny.

[Ingram85]

I think you need to lay off the weed.

[fruitvilla]

48 minutes ago, Ingram85 said:

I think

I could argue you don't.