According to the theory, you can not be destroyed because, as a pattern, you don't exist. — Hippyhead

But things that exist cannot be destroyed either, as you stated. My point was that you seem to be assuming that to be destroyed, you have to exist, even while saying that such things that exist--matter and energy--cannot be destroyed either.

So maybe nothing can be destroyed? But you did claim that patterns are created, when you said that a wave was "a pattern created by energy applied to water". But surely something that can be created can be destroyed, no?

So I cannot be destroyed because I'm not the kind of thing that cannot be destroyed? :chin:

This again? Time to move on, HH. Work on improving your own posts.

This does not look promising, The Opposite.

ok

Well that's the grown-up assumption as far as I'm concerned. That debate is silly, in my opinion, but that doesn't mean I'll delete or move such a discussion. Sam's discussion was along those lines but as I recall it wasn't put in the Lounge, despite being crackpottery.

How do I get a NDE thread onto the main page? I'm not sure if it's considered a philosophical area. — The Opposite

By writing a good opening post. The topic can be approached philosophically, but even purely psychological, neurological, or anthropological approaches are fine too. I'd be less sympathetic to a discussion in which people actually took these studies to be evidence of an afterlife.

If you're going to complain about someone publicly, I think you should be specific. I don't see any evidence of unmodlike comments over the past few days. In any case you could flag the comments that you don't like, or tell me about them privately.

Street is a very good moderator. So far, that outweighs his less obviously beneficial idiosyncrasies.

I'm closing this now.

Cool post :up:

:up:

I read "Quining Qualia" this morning, to try and work out what Dennett was saying and make some contribution to this discussion, but then realized that it had nothing to do with what people are talking about here. I suggest a reading group.

:up:

I was a bit startled to see that everything I had written on this site, even my own photo, was showing up for anyone to read without anyone signing into the forum website. I don't blame the administrators of this site. It merely shows that Google, in England at least, is watching us at all times. — Jack Cummins

Like all public websites, this one can be accessed by web crawlers like Googlebot, and it gets crawled a lot because it ranks highly and changes frequently (this is why the Google search engine is so useful.) Only posting comments is confined to authenticated users, not reading them.

If you're concerned, we could change your username now and within a few days or weeks, any connection between your real name and this website will disappear, because the relevant pages in Google's index will be crawled again, and the old name effectively overwritten. Probably.

Sorry for going off topic people.

Which I think clearly, if inadvertently, highlights the basic philosophical contradiction within Dawkins' view, which is that what an Aristotelian would call 'efficient and material causes' are the only real causes. It is precisely the idea of 'final cause' - 'the reason that something exists' - that has been eliminated, in Dawkins' understanding. And so effectively, that he can't even understand why someone would ask such a question. — Wayfarer

That's fair. Or he might be saying that there is no use looking for a "why" in the way that we look for causes in science (or even religion), and that we have to use our own intelligence and our eminently reasonable liberal values to decide on our own existential purpose. In which case, he might not be entirely rejecting final causes, but merely separating them from science.

All the posturing, spite and confusion on this thread are ideological in nature. — Olivier5

I think this is about right, but it applies to both sides. Very disappointing.

The reason Midgley was furious about Gene the Shellfish was that it described human beings as slaves to their genes. Such full biological determinism is eminently ideological -- it tells people that they are not free -- and it's an ideology with dark history (eugenism, racism, slavery, nazism, etc.). — Olivier5

It's true that The Selfish Gene is partly ideological—I think that all popular biology is inescapably ideological—but it's in the realm of Hobbes rather than Hitler, and with a certain liberal and "scientific rationalist" understanding of the Enlightenment. It has little in common with Nazism.

Because what you miss in the passage above is that Dawkins's moral and political message is that, thanks to our unique intelligence and scientific society, we are not slaves to our genes, that we are free—precisely the opposite of what you imply he's saying.

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. — The Selfish Gene

There have been very few submissions. Maybe just one or two aside from my own, and they were not what we're looking for. I'm as surprised about this as you are. I suppose that those who are able to write good articles would rather publish them elsewhere.

I didn't even know you had sent it. In our private conversation, you just went silent, giving no indication of what you were going to do, and I rarely check infoatthephilosophyforumdotcom . I've posted it in the editors' private area, so maybe someone will read it now. Thanks for the contribution.

reMarkable seems to be first and foremost an e-writer, rather than an e-reader. That would put me off if I was looking primarily for a reader. Looks great though.

I left a few hundred books stored in boxes in Scotland when I took up my itinerant life in 2012 and had to get a kindle. I went back to hard copies recently and it has triggered a new enthusiasm for reading, but I'm disappointed at how bad the print quality and font sizes are in many printed books--no doubt my eyesight has deteriorated over the past few years. On a kindle I can adjust the font size, and I have a backlight that doesn't disturb my sleeping wife, so I'm going back to kindle except for books that just feel a lot better in printed form: big complex books and those with pictures or diagrams.

I love buying and possessing books but I'm aware that this probably shallow acquisitiveness disappears when I actually get into reading one. Or rather, it's independent of the experience of reading: the book I'm into is no longer interesting from the acquisitive standpoint, which turns towards other, newer, immaculate and shiny books.

That's how I tend to end up with many more books than I can possibly read. If I didn't live in a foreign country with only a couple of English-language bookshops and no Amazon, I would have lost control of this tendency some time ago.

If they're paperbacks, the books I read do not remain immaculate and shiny. Among other bad habits, I use the page corners--say 20 pages together--to clean my nails.

Take them with you on trips? — tim wood

If I'm going away for a day or two, yes, but not generally when I'm leaving the house. I don't understand how people can walk and read, or even read in public at all. I can't not look at and listen to what's around me. For reading I prefer to be alone in a quiet place where there's no risk of being disturbed, and no extraneous stimulation.

:cool:

Here's something about words that I find interesting, but I'm not sure if you Americans will understand it. When I'm bantering with my brother or my close friends, we will call each other names, and I often reach for American ones like dingus, dweeb, doofus, douchebag/douche, and poindexter (it's not all Ds).

There's an amusing ironic quality to the insults when I use those words, because they're not natural words for us to use with each other. They sound almost corny--we Brits pick them up from old movies and TV, of course--so they undercut the offensiveness of the insults. To use one of those words is to make oneself ridiculous, thereby introducing the classic comedy of a self-righteously angry but ridiculous person.

... I'm not sure if you Americans will understand it — me in this very post

I imagine that Americans might sometimes use British (or Italian or Spanish or whatever) terms in a similar way, but surely the resulting quality, texture, and humour of the insult are quite different?

I think I knew that already.

Yes I know, but I'm generous with my condescending approval.

That's the spirit.

Incidentally, I quite like "scurrilous". It's partly because it makes me think of squirrels and other rodents, I suppose because they're animals that scurry.

The next part that you didn't quote explains this. — Noble Dust

No, it doesn't.

As I said, I didn't start this thread; I only revived it. I dunno what else you want. — Noble Dust

I want to criticize you for bizarrely trying to police this thread.

Cradle — Noble Dust

Very nice. But I could say, inspired by you: may I remind you that the point of this thread is not to just give us a word you like, with no comment about it. T Clark showed us the way, by giving us some words and telling us why he liked them. I'm worried that this thread has devolved into a word-mentioning contest, devoid of actual appreciation. And so on. It should be obvious that this isn't serious; I hope you get the point.

I can; however, this is not what people are actually doing. — Noble Dust

This is a scurrilous accusation. Perhaps dick-measuring is what Sir2u is doing, but I don't see any evidence otherwise. Anyway, so what?

In my case, I chose a word that was obscure to me, but not because I wanted to impress anyone. I was really struck by the word and was quite excited about it. It kind of ... opened up a world to me.

What I'm worried about is... — Noble Dust

Why on Earth would you be worried?

has devolved into a love of impressive/and/or/obscure words — Noble Dust

Maybe you should have posted some rules in bold and upper case, like "Please post words that you love, unless they are impressive and obscure. Only familiar words are allowed. If you break this rule I will throw tantrums."

But pleasing words don't have to be any of these things. — Noble Dust

You can demonstrate this by continuing to post unimpressive and familiar words that you like.

Generally, why can't you just let people post words that take their fancy? Why this weird need for control? Why so serious? You're just spoiling people's fun.

:cool:

It's great. Interestingly, it's based on an earlier piece composed for ondes martenot, an early electronic instrument:



It doesn't have the same power as the version in the Quartet for the End of Time, but it's quite amazing: ethereal and pleasingly strange.

Yeh it's unfortunate that his fanaticism is what came to the fore. He was warned about it several times, so the ban didn't come out of nowhere.

:up:

You're getting plenty of engagement, MSC, much more than most who've been here only one week. If someone in particular doesn't reply to you, I suggest you get over it. I've been ignored by the old goat Banno too many times to mention.

Please report any posts or discussions that you think should be subject to some sort of moderation. You can use the flag function or, like Philosophim suggests, PM one of the staff.

I'm moving this to the Feedback section and closing it.

If you haven't read it, I recommend Ben Watson's book Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, which looks at Zappa's music through the lens of critical theory, Marxism and left-wing politics, literary theory, and so on. It's very weird and I think misguided in places, but really good fun, and genuinely insightful and interesting. And you can tell he's a true fan. The word he often uses for Zappa's music is I think perfect: scabrous.

The thing about that song's lyrics that I've always found most interesting is the temporal transgressiveness:

My python boot is too tight
I couldn't get it off last night
A week went by, and now it's July

How does that work?

EDIT: That's the best Zappa band lineup in my opinion. Virtuosic but warm, with Frank at his best on guitar.

Unless you take Pinprick's easy route to engagement--which I don't advise--it can take a while to get noticed. The old timers here tend to engage with each other, and newbies are sometimes ignored at first. Just keep at it.

God-forward. I'm not keen on god-level sweet.

There's a lot of crappy cheap god-level sweet Russian wines, but there are some good ones. Krasnodar Krai has the perfect conditions and many of their wines produce reactions like, "daahling this is simply divine!"

It's great.

That's all I've got. I'm no connoisseur.

I like Georgian wine but in Sochi I was drinking local Russian (Krasnodar Krai) and Crimean wine.

Yes she's Russian, but no, just a three month visa. But they're changing the rules, so soon I'll be able to get longer visas. It's a big hassle so I hope they hurry up and introduce the changes before I apply for the next one.

Thanks to the Russian President's ukaz decreeing that foreigners can stay for [visa expiration date] + 185 days, I've been happily stuck here in Russia since January (thank you Vladimir Vladimirovich). I'll have to leave next month so now seems like a good time to update this thread.

I first went to the Caucasus in early March. That was a fascinating trip, but in this post I'll write about my most recent visit to that region, a holiday in and around Sochi that I've just got back from.

Sochi is a holiday resort in the South of Russia on the Black Sea, at one end of the Caucasus mountains and very close to the border with Abkhazia (or Georgia if you choose not to recognize Abkhazia's independence). The coastline here is sometimes called the Caucasian Riviera, and together with the nearby Crimea it's the only warm water coastline in Russia. The climate is humid subtropical, and high forested mountains rise up just inland. It's a beautiful part of the world, and quite strange. Imagine a Soviet Monaco.

One of the books I had with me was a history of Russia, but it failed to cover the one subject that would have given me an insight into the surprising experiences I had while I was there: the Soviet tradition of taking your allotted two week holiday in a Black Sea sanatorium.

Soviet sanatoriums, which were also popular in Communist Eastern and Central Europe, were different from Western European and American sanatoriums (or sanitariums), which were mainly for chronic illness or mental disorders. The Soviet ones were more like holiday health resorts, but with more medical facilities than you would associate with a Western spa. I knew a little about them through my interest in modernist architecture, but I didn't know they were still a part of Russian life: that some of them are still going, that there are modern hotels that offer the same treatments, and that Russian attitudes to holidays and health are still informed by the tradition.

The system of sanatorium holidays was based on an ideology that combined patriotic dedication to hard work—which could only be ensured with an annual two week rest—with the ideal of a healthy lifestyle supported by natural therapies and "wellness", preventive medicine, strict diets (with no alcohol), and moral and intellectual edification. This was meant to contrast with the decadent bourgeois practice of going on holiday just to have fun.

Being a decadent Western (petit) bourgeois myself, I had intended to consume a lot of rich and unusual food and alcohol. The area produces delicious wine, seafood, figs and cheese are abundant, the local bread is as good as any French or Italian bread, but different. Lamb from the mountains is marinated and grilled over wood and served with plum sauce.

And that's what I did while we were in Sochi itself, in a hotel by the sea that I had booked. But for the second part of the holiday we moved to another hotel, this time in the mountains. My wife chose it and I didn't know much about it except that it looked nice, was surrounded by mountains, and they demanded a negative COVID‑19 test, which kind of impressed me.

On our first day at this hotel I got a cold, and my wife suggested I visit the inhalatorium downstairs. My normal strategy against colds is like Field Marshal Kutuzov's successful strategy against Napoleon: do nothing and it'll go away. But I went along with her suggestion, and I was curious anyway. It turns out there was a kind of hospital downstairs, staffed by various medical specialists.

When the procedures were over and I'd taken the plastic tube out of my nose, my wife said she'd made some more appointments for me over the next few days and I could cancel them if I wanted. I didn't cancel them but I did resent the imposition, even though it was well-meant. I hadn't expected all this. Had it been intentional deception on my wife's part, or did it seem so normal to her that she hadn't thought to mention it? In any case, my own feeling is that I don't mind going to doctors but I don't want to do it when I'm trying to relax and enjoy myself. It began to dawn on me that there was more to this holiday than I'd been led to believe, that this was some kind of modern-day sanatorium.

And that's pretty much what it was: true, it wasn't called a sanatorium but a "medical spa hotel"; we weren't assigned the accommodation by the state; the services were not free; I could drink wine if I wanted (tellingly though, vodka was unavailable); and our daily timetable was not set by the staff. But otherwise it was definitely in the sanatorial tradition. The mineral water on tap and the oxygen cocktails at the bar all began to make sense.

As with the Soviet sanatoriums themselves, it wasn't all quackery. These were real doctors. I had a few diagnostic scans, general checkups and consultations, all of which seemed pretty legit. Turns out I need to lose weight, eat less salt and fried food, and drink less alcohol, or else I'll be at risk of heart attacks down the road. On the one hand, they would say that. On the other hand, they're probably right. It shouldn't have been a surprising diagnosis but I was shocked and disappointed, and became a bit depressed about it, which made me even more resentful.

Then I got gastroenteritis. The result was that I was stuck in the room most of the time, on a diet of gruel, plain rice, sauceless chicken breast, and herbal tea. And I couldn't drink coffee or alcohol. My mother-in-law had unexpectedly followed us to the same hotel, and she and my wife ganged up on me to make me comply with these rules.

Through sheer force of will I recovered after 24 hours and eased myself back to holiday decadence. My mother-in-law said that if I was going to drink so soon after my gastrointestinal troubles—which she did not advise—it should be Armenian brandy, which was okay with me. Of course, I couldn't get brandy in the hotel and had to go to a nearby cafe. Incidentally, the biggest name in Armenian brandy is Ararat, but Mount Ararat seems to be in Turkey, and only visible from Armenia, so I don't know what's going on with that.

The biggest surprise came on the last day. I was due for another ultrasound check and I was expecting it to be the bladder and maybe even some gentle genital examination, but as I was undressing, my wife translated one of the doctor's questions, which was along the lines of "are you sure you're okay to do this now?" I saw the instrument by her side and asked, "is that an anal probe?" Indeed it was. For a moment I felt panic, but realized that backing out now would have been lame, and I had to start getting tested for prostate cancer anyway.

Lying on my side with a large and bulbous plastic transducer up my ass, I said to my wife, who was watching the whole thing, "this is the best holiday I've ever had". We all laughed, and afterwards I went straight out and had three Armenian brandies while waiting for the airport taxi.

In case you're wondering, my prostate is fine and I have a flawless rectum.

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The Rosa Springs Hotel ... offers treatment at the highest sanatorium standards in its own Health Center, specialized in health improvement through water using the healing mineral springs of Krasnaya Polyana.

The balneological direction of the hotel was not chosen by chance. It was in the Rosa Springs building during the 2014 Winter Olympics that the medical center was located with the latest diagnostic and treatment facilities for Olympians. The healing effect in the mountains of Krasnaya Polyana is achieved thanks to a life-giving combination of two elements - the sea and the mountains: ionized air has unique healing properties. — Rosa Springs Hotel

The tension between turning to nature for health and conquering nature through rapid industrialization and urbanization was inherent to the Soviet project at its origins. As I reveal, the health resort was cultivated as a place apart from the politics and mass mobilization of the city. Yet it encouraged popular attachment to the native land, and provided important benefits to the population, and so had a stabilizing function in Soviet society and culture, ultimately supporting the Soviet project. — Geisler, The Soviet Sanatorium: Medicine, Nature and Mass Culture in Sochi, 1917-1991

The photo below is of Druzhba Sanatorium, one of the famous Soviet-era Black Sea sanatoriums.



https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/9100/holidays-in-soviet-sanatoriums-ussr-tourism-photography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanatorium_(resort)
The Soviet Sanatorium: Medicine, Nature and Mass Culture in Sochi, 1917-1991

The deepest tunes have no lyrics — Noble Dust

Yep. Schopenhauer was right.