Poll: Think you think straight? Think again...

[Wilko316]

33% ... ouch.
I think it's because my opinions can't come down to simply 'agree' and 'disagree', there were quite a few questions where I didn't want to choose either. There should be an 'other' option there I think, or something like that anyway.

 

[Fetzenfisch]

i got 20% but disagree with the analysis. I indeed can say that killing is wrong and that world war two was just a war. I dont see any problem there. The war was started by killing so it was wrong from beginning also. qed
bs test the questions asked are random and partly pointless, completely out of balance and the pollchoices completely enforces me in saying: what a waste of time

 

[olehund]

Hi Raven's Nest,
First off all liking the debate you got going here. A lot of interesting positions and opinions surfacing throughout. Not that I could be arsed to read them all, but at least I'm consistently lazy.

I was wondering how you justify the assumption that "philosophical health" equates to logical consistency. I ask this because I observed you gave a few encouraging responses to people with low score. It's also demonstrated by how many posters who report low scores and seem to take pride in that.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I think philosophy is the study of, among other things: knowledge, reality and existence. However, this test and quite a few posters seem to indicate that knowledge, reality and existence is governed by logic. That philosophy is logical, and that a good philosopher is consistent in her/his logic.

Could we not playfully imagine that the world actually has no logic and there are completely different structures that our feeble human minds cannot grasp? I'd like to think so...

 

[bushwhacker2k]

Do you believe that people should be free to make their own decisions and live out their lives doing what they want so long as they don't hurt anyone else?

Do you believe a person should be arrested if they sat next to you on a park bench and injected themselves with heroin in front of you and your kids?

Well, you can't actually have one without the other.

I was thinking about this logically, but your third sentence here makes me disagree.

Does the term hurt necessarily have to mean physically inflicting pain directly from one person to another? There are far more ways to negatively influence someone outside of beating them.

If you make someone think it'd be funny to jump off a bridge and hurt themselves, then that's a different form of hurting someone. An indirect way of hurting them.

If you influence someone to alienate the people who care about them and lead a depressing lifestyle, then they aren't taking physical pain from it but are ultimately being negatively affected by your very indirect action.

In that train of thought, both the first and the second sentence can in fact work together.

I don't mean to be offensive, but in this viewpoint I question your understanding of objectivity and subjectivity. Not that I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Also, subjectively, I don't think drugs are necessarily bad. The factor that I dislike the most is how addictive a substance is. If a kid can have a stupid rebellious moment and take a few drugs that might eventually harm his internal processes through continued but stops soon after, there is likely little harm done; but if he can't stop because he effectively has OCD regarding the substance then it's a serious problem that can be created through a stupid thoughtless action.

 

[Gralian]

I got 33%. But i never claimed that my philosophies were entirely self-contained and non-conflicting. I understand there will always be discrepancy, because nothing in life is as purely black and white. I think it's why politics never really works out - because it's about two parties showing two different extremes of the same scale and never take a moderate middle ground. I'm exaggerating to make my point here, but i hope you get what i mean. There's never a "this person is slightly conservative but slightly liberal as well" regardless of how 'flexible' government policies try to be. I also think that 33% is "about right" for the majority of people who would take this test, as it shows a healthy contradiction in one's philosophies that let you take a step back to question them rather than champion them so vehemently that you are blind to exceptions that may call out flaws in your thinking and make you appear entirely inflexible in your logic, which just isn't the case for many people.

 

[antidonkey]

7% here with one question in tension. Interesting quiz/test/whatever.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

That's because they are using the philosophical definition of consciousness, and you are using the medical. Let me get some bits from a dictionary quick, as it is an awkward double use of a word that English loves to do so very much...

Medical: The full activity of the mind and senses, as in waking life. Ex: To regain consciousness after fainting.

Philosophical: The mind or the mental faculties as characterized by thought, feelings, and volition. Ex: Your self-hood as a sentient being, what makes you exist as you.

So they were really being redundant in using both the words consciousness and self-hood in that sentence honestly now that I look at it...

Brain damage is a medical condition. Conciousness is also a physiological condition. How does the test expect you to think of it?

Forgoing the seemingly Eurocentric assessment of what spirituality is without considerations to, say ... people who believe that that the soul of individuals is part of a greater whole (e.g. totemism).

It's both patronising and .... downright wrong. The two questions that found themselves in conflict have aspects of the religious, philosophical, physiological and, to boot, are culturally specific ...

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

I got 7%.

Only conflict, apparently, was this:

Spoiler

I can kind of understand, but I don't think I know anyone nor know of anyone who believes genocide isn't a bad thing.

yeah this one got me too

there is a clear line on that one, regardless of looking a it objectively on paper.

i got 20% but i would rate myself a bit lower than that, a couple of those were a little..they assumed much on your part on what exactly you believed even though you might not have, just in certain cases.

 

[Nephus]

Well, as a one size fits all test, this does a pretty good job, but it does miss a few alternate philosophical paths. Should people be allowed to do anything they want so long as it doesn't harm anyone else? No. They should be allowed to do anything they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone, including themselves. Of course, if that were put into effect in the broadest of terms I'd have to stop enjoying this very wonderful cigarette I've got hanging out of my mouth and never enjoy a cheeseburger again, but if applied with a little more care you get something more of what I'm aiming for.

Take the drug issue. If someone smokes a joint after a hard day at work, that isn't even remotely the same as a meth addict destroying themselves for the sake of their addiction. They need help, and need to be stopped for their own good. Throwing them in a tiny room for the rest of their lives doesn't fix what they've done to themselves. Rehab, counselling, and someone to check up on them now and then could help them turn their lives around. They've already punished themselves more than the judicial system has a hope of doing.

I mean, take alcohol for instance. I enjoy a glass of wine with a nice dinner, the occasional beer with friends, and the rare all night tequila bender that has me trying to figure out where my pants are the next morning. I'm not hurting anyone. But an alcoholic is hurting themselves and everyone around them, in both a very physical as well as a metaphorical sense. Should that mean that all alcohol should be illegal? That sipping on a Zima should get you 5 years in prison? No. It just means that we need to help those who have developed a problem with it.

So, this all or nothing approach of letting people shoot heroin in public vs never letting anyone do anything is crap. This whole criminalization of serious problems is akin to imprisoning someone for getting cancer because they worked on a construction site that had asbestos around. Maybe not the best choice in retrospect, but now it's past that and they have a problem that needs help not punishment.

 

[Raven's Nest]

Hi Raven's Nest,
First off all liking the debate you got going here. A lot of interesting positions and opinions surfacing throughout. Not that I could be arsed to read them all, but at least I'm consistently lazy.

I was wondering how you justify the assumption that "philosophical health" equates to logical consistency. I ask this because I observed you gave a few encouraging responses to people with low score. It's also demonstrated by how many posters who report low scores and seem to take pride in that.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I think philosophy is the study of, among other things: knowledge, reality and existence. However, this test and quite a few posters seem to indicate that knowledge, reality and existence is governed by logic. That philosophy is logical, and that a good philosopher is consistent in her/his logic.

Thanks, I'm quite happy that this thread has grown and been relatively free of unwarranted negativity. Though I really must put it down and do my coursework for college...

Firstly, I didn't coin the phrase "Philosophical Health Check", I borrowed it from the site I got it from and for my opinion on how this relates to logical consistency I'll borrow something I wrote earlier to another poster which summed up my position...

I've played around on this site for a bit and have come to realise that it expects ones beliefs to be rigid, not flexible. Now, I'm no Philosopher, but I am a big fan of flexibility in life. Can someone more comfortable in this subject explain this to me?

Essentially, the more rigid your belief structure is, the more logical you are being in our approach to ideas like morality and ethics which means you are more likely to make good judgements (or are better able to justify your actions)...

Lets say you agreed that in order to save 90 people out of a group of 100, you'd kill 10 of them based on the moral concept of "The needs of the many before the needs of the few."

If your reasoning was that it is worth killing 10% of a group of people because you are saving so many people, you would supposedly have no problems killing 1,000,000 to save 9,000,000 people or killing 1 in a group of 10 of your best friends to save their lives.

They might have been your best friends, but you if you agreed that sacrificing 10% is worth it but refused to kill them, then your conviction for making moral judgements based on "The needs of the many before the needs of the few." is in dispute. Therefore your logic sucks...

But like most humans, with their backs against the wall, they'll ignore logic in favour of finding a solution no matter how dire the situation. So flexibility in your life is both good and bad, but it's always best to understand your decision making process as it'll help you make better judgements. You dig?

Could we not playfully imagine that the world actually has no logic and there are completely different structures that our feeble human minds cannot grasp? I'd like to think so...

I totally agree with you. I don't see logic as objective, but as a subjective attempt to give order to an inherently chaotic existence... There may well be concepts concerning objectivity that we are simply as of yet, unable to understand.

But that won't help me pick the best route to work in the morning. So logic is the best thing we have for now... Might as well be good at it.

 

[iamthe1]

I just got worked up about this nonsense because it's arbitrary and silly and does nothing to actually engage anyone in elenchus, which is an obnoxious greek word that means pretty much what I said in the above paragraph. A set of propositions is consistent or inconsistent no matter who believes them...

and I should have just said that this quiz is shite. It would have saved me a lot of typing.

It's cool, it might be psuedo-philosophy, but if it encourages people to think a little bit more about their ideas and perceptions, I think that can only be a good thing for them.

So not philosophical? Fine. But I believe it at least has some purpose and usefulness to those that don't have a philosophy major... Which is most of us

I wonder what Frankl would have made of it?

My friend, there're reasons why I started studying math: 'Cause the only philosophy that's worth doing is the kind that doesn't matter to anyone but those who do philosophy for a living, and because in mathematics NOBODY FUCKING ARGUES WITH YOU. EVER. You are right, or you are wrong. That's it. Game over.

Hooray!

But I agree that it is important for people to recognize and attempt to reconcile the tensions in what they believe. I just don't think that this quiz is going to do anything even close to that unless your psyche was so monumentally fractured in the first place that you somehow think that "Killing puppies is always good" and "Eating whole grains is always healthy" are dichotomous propositions. I'm just not at all inclined to call it philosophy. It's really not that hard to discover for yourself if your beliefs are consistent...

as long as you're not a Republican. ZING!

It's much, much harder--but also more rewarding--to attempt to discover if your beliefs are also true.

 

[Raven's Nest]

Do you believe that people should be free to make their own decisions and live out their lives doing what they want so long as they don't hurt anyone else?

Do you believe a person should be arrested if they sat next to you on a park bench and injected themselves with heroin in front of you and your kids?

Well, you can't actually have one without the other.

I was thinking about this logically, but your third sentence here makes me disagree.

Does the term hurt necessarily have to mean physically inflicting pain directly from one person to another? There are far more ways to negatively influence someone outside of beating them.

Agreed, I meant for the term to mainly mean physical harm, but the question was left deliberately ambiguous...

Here's the explanation from the OP if you didn't see it.

It was deliberately ambiguous. And I personally agree with a lot of you regarding the specifics of the question, although the purpose of the question wasn't to ask for your stance on drugs, the real point of the question was this...

Should people live freely so long as they do not harm others?

Should something be made illegal if it can harm oneself?

If we believe the first statement we should also accept the potential consequences of the second. There is at least some conflict in one's attitudes toward personal freedom if both statements are agreed with in this case.

Those statements are designed to come into conflict with each other. My apologies for not making the questions a little clearer.

In order to have clear thoughts about the first two statements, one has to consider the greater implications.

The third statement in fairness should have read "Well you can't necessarily have both". But that might have given the game away a bit.

 

[FoolKiller]

Okay... This is utter bullshit. I got 13% but that is because the questions want you to choose something based on little or no information. Especially where I didn't want to choose either agree or disagree based on the context of the test.

Oh well, another amusing yet completely useless time waster

 

[Raven's Nest]

My friend, there're reasons why I started studying math: 'Cause the only philosophy that's worth doing is the kind that doesn't matter to anyone but those who do philosophy for a living, and because in mathematics NOBODY FUCKING ARGUES WITH YOU. EVER. You are right, or you are wrong. That's it. Game over.

Hooray!

But I agree that it is important for people to recognize and attempt to reconcile the tensions in what they believe. I just don't think that this quiz is going to do anything even close to that unless your psyche was so monumentally fractured in the first place that you somehow think that "Killing puppies is always good" and "Eating whole grains is always healthy" are dichotomous propositions. I'm just not at all inclined to call it philosophy. It's really not that hard to discover for yourself if your beliefs are consistent...

as long as you're not a Republican. ZING!

It's much, much harder--but also more rewarding--to attempt to discover if your beliefs are also true.

Granted the Escapist is generally more intelligent than the average corner of the internet but it matters not how intelligent you are if you have simply never considered these concepts...

The test might have made for a good introduction to a high school philosophy class, then they would have moved on to analyse why the test is flawed.

Better than a "What's your favourite nasal hair configuration?" thread or some such crap.

 

[Raven's Nest]

People saying that atheisim is a religion really gets up my nose.

Awesome avatar dude.

ty, yours makes me laugh every time I see it xD

Funny to watch people get so bent outta shape over this test when the test itself says it's not perfect.

Saying "it isn't perfect" is being extremely kind...

Apparently if you have a differing opinion on a single question, "the entire test is bullshit!"

Me lol and sigh at the same time.

 

[6037084]

20%, would have been lower if this was in my first language since i didn't quite understand a few questions

 

[The Stonker]

This is one of the silliest online tests I've ever taken.
The thing is that I believe in the freedom of a human beign and that nobody,I SAY NOBODY! Should ever be discriminated.
But I also do believe that a man should take care of his country first not the third world.
But I scored 40%, what a load of bullocks.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

13%.
And I am not very impressed by their reasoning why those things are incongruent.
As they themselves say at the top of the resultspage: "Some sophisticated reasoning is required to enable both beliefs to be held consistently."

And I do nothing else all day but think about stuff

 

[bushwhacker2k]

Do you believe that people should be free to make their own decisions and live out their lives doing what they want so long as they don't hurt anyone else?

Do you believe a person should be arrested if they sat next to you on a park bench and injected themselves with heroin in front of you and your kids?

Well, you can't actually have one without the other.

I was thinking about this logically, but your third sentence here makes me disagree.

Does the term hurt necessarily have to mean physically inflicting pain directly from one person to another? There are far more ways to negatively influence someone outside of beating them.

Agreed, I meant for the term to mainly mean physical harm, but the question was left deliberately ambiguous...

Here's the explanation from the OP if you didn't see it.

It was deliberately ambiguous. And I personally agree with a lot of you regarding the specifics of the question, although the purpose of the question wasn't to ask for your stance on drugs, the real point of the question was this...

Should people live freely so long as they do not harm others?

Should something be made illegal if it can harm oneself?

If we believe the first statement we should also accept the potential consequences of the second. There is at least some conflict in one's attitudes toward personal freedom if both statements are agreed with in this case.

Those statements are designed to come into conflict with each other. My apologies for not making the questions a little clearer.

In order to have clear thoughts about the first two statements, one has to consider the greater implications.

The third statement in fairness should have read "Well you can't necessarily have both". But that might have given the game away a bit.

Okay, thanks for addressing what I said

IMO regarding the nature of harm as being a negative influence, however indirect, I DO believe people should be allowed to do as they wish as long as they don't bring that upon people.

If we only talk about harm as being a direct assault upon someone's person, then it gets a lot more specific as to what people should and shouldn't be able to do.