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Unofficial fan channel for Existential Comics official website existentialcomics.com I'm NOT the author of the webcomic, I just forward it on telegram
A lot of words come to us from ancient Greek schools of philosophy (stoic, cynic, skeptic, etc). None of them are is far off from their original definition as "epicurean", which seems to sort of mean rich people who indulge in luxury and pleasure. Epicurus believed the road to happiness was more about restricting your desires, living in simple moderation, and having good friendships. This nerd on YouTube explains it pretty well, if you are interested in more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVpDOfTHLKg
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Early Wittgenstein Becomes Late Wittgenstein - Existential Comics
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seriously though why did we even bother industrializing if we weren't going to share in the gains that it made??
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The Philosophy of Time and Ice Cream - Existential Comics
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The Philosophy of Genie Wishes - Existential Comics
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Socratic Hostage Negotiations - Existential Comics
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"We need philosophers to be in charge because only they could come up with the best lies to keep these idiots in line"
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"oh and another thing...metaphysics is stupid"
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Seriously though, come on scientists, it's called THEORETICAL physics, I want to see some more fun theories here. Let's get wacky with it.
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Apparently there is an old Indonesian myth that says that Orangutans have the ability to speak human languages, but choose not to, because they know if we caught them speaking we would force them to get jobs.
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As an aside the wikipedia page for "list of french stereotypes" was pretty disappointing, people really need to get in there and expand it, because I feel like there must be more there.
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The Cotton Looms get all the press in the early industrial revolution, but the Threshing Machine really might be the biggest jump in productive capacity in the history of the world. It cut out so much manual labor (people used to have to bash flails against the grain for hours and hours to separate the seeds) that there were riots all over because it caused so much unemployment and social upheaval. The famous Luddites, who people think of as being opposed to all technology, were mostly mad about automated cotton looms, and their consequences on society. They even went so far as destroying the looms (and other similar movements destroyed threshing machines). They weren't just backwards thinking technology haters though, but rational people who noticed that there was something deeply wrong with how society was organized that a machine which improved efficiency so much was causing poverty and even starvation among the very workers who it should have benefited. It wasn't the Luddites who were irrational, but the structure of society itself. After all it should be the people doing back breaking work who are most happy about a machine replacing them, but because all efficiency gains go to the owners, those people are simply out of a job. We've seen this time and time again under capitalism, and is even going on right now with AI.
The dragon is based on Adam Smith, who noticed these kind of improvements in production were the key to increasing the wealth of a given society, and that reorganization of society from feudal lords, who largely spent their money on luxuries, to industrial capitalists, who spent a lot of their money on "research and development", i.e. improving the efficiency of their factories, was causing economic growth and ever increasing wealth. In order to modernize, societies essentially had to get rid of the feudal lords put all of their money into the hands of capitalists as much as possible, to kick start this kind of economic growth.
As for myself, what causes the most happiness is being rude to customers.
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"on second thought, the entire history of philosophy is stupid."
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Panel 1 is a depiction of Neanderthals in the Shanidar Cave, in particular the "Shanidar 1" specimen, which showed a large number of old injuries and disabilities in the individual. The fact that they had lived for so long showed that the Neanderthal community cared for their members even when they were no longer "useful" physically to society.
It's kind of hard to imagine going back and showing the Shanidar Neanderthals all the gains we've made as a society to produce enough food for everyone, and yet people still go hungry. Then again, imagine showing him Nintendo Switch. I bet he'd love Nintendo Switch, so it's really a wash.
Sort of an homage to this comic:
http://www.yellow5.com/pokey/archive/index396.html
And Pokey the Penguin in general. I read that comic around 20 years and somehow always remembered the phrase "Suddenly, Time Passes". Possibly the most metaphysically philosophical phrase to ever be written in a webcomic, and amazingly, the Pokey the Penguin comic is still running today.
Dang actually we should have wished to live forever, then we would have infinite time to figure out if chairs exist or not.
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Socrates, pointing the gun, "oh yeah, one more thing, can you go ahead and define what you think justice means? because you seem to claim to know..."
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Also, on a metaphysical level, the science museum and the philosophy museum are exactly the same anyway, when you think about it.
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Despite believing that poets corrupted society because poets did not seek the truth, Plato himself was quite open to philosophers telling lies to an uneducated society. The Myth of Er is a sort of proto Christian Hell idea, which would keep people behaving well because they thought they would be punished in the afterlife. Plato actually thought we should behave well because a virtuous life was genuinely the best life on Earth, but presumably not everyone was going to go along with that.
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Transcendental French Freedom - Existential Comics
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The Cotton Looms get all the press in the early industrial revolution, but the Threshing Machine really might be the biggest jump in productive capacity in the history of the world. It cut out so much manual labor (people used to have to bash flails against the grain for hours and hours to separate the seeds) that there were riots all over because it caused so much unemployment and social upheaval. The famous Luddites, who people think of as being opposed to all technology, were mostly mad about threshing machines, and their consequences on society. They even went so far as destroying the threshing machines. They weren't just backwards thinking technology haters though, but rational people who noticed that there was something deeply wrong with how society was organized that a machine which improved farming efficiency so much was causing poverty and even starvation among farm workers. It wasn't the Luddites who were irrational, but the structure of society itself. After all it should be the people doing back breaking work who are most happy about a machine replacing them, but because all efficiency gains go to the owners, those people are simply out of a job. We've seen this time and time again under capitalism, and is even going on right now with AI.
The dragon is based on Adam Smith, who noticed these kind of improvements in production were the key to increasing the wealth of a given society, and that reorganization of society from feudal lords, who largely spent their money on luxuries, to industrial capitalists, who spent a lot of their money on "research and development", i.e. improving the efficiency of their factories, was causing economic growth and ever increasing wealth. In order to modernize, societies essentially had to get rid of the feudal lords put all of their money into the hands of capitalists as much as possible, to kick start this kind of economic growth.