if we can't make sense of the notion of free will logically, — Hanover

Just depends on where the logic starts from. If what you are is a gear in the works, then it sounds like magic that you could rise up from gear-hood and replace what would have been with what you ordain.

But what if you aren't a gear? What if your body acts all gear-like, but what you are is something beyond that? Maybe someday we'll discover what consciousness really is and be amazed.

I had a dream once where I exited this universe. I was in this blackness and I turned to see the universe like a big ball beside me. I experimented on re-entering it. It had something to do with how I looked into it. There was a certain way that everything in the ball would start to make sense, and I'd realize I was re-entering it. But I didn't want to get trapped in it, so I turned and got back out.

Anyway, the point is that there's nothing clear about what's really going on. We have no clue. What drives you to believe this or that about determinism is emotion, not logic.

But on the longer time than day or a week or two, the likely of it going down is quite high . — ssu

Then why don't you short some stocks?

A "no" from what?

The claims made by the Administration? — Paine

They say being struck by lightning is a good thing.

Ok. — Banno

Sounds like you're unfamiliar with the topic.

Seriously? — Banno

Yes.

But again, the question I asked was not if Trump might control the markets, but the extent to whciht he markets might control Trump. — Banno

Wall St appears to be ranging right now, which means it's just going up and down between two levels. It's presently going down, yes. It will hit a certain level and start going back up. Something bigger than unease about Trump would have to appear to make it head back down and cross the "support" level it's been respecting for about six months now. Anyone who tells you they know what it's going to do next is full of it. Absolutely no one knows.

It is rare to have a position argued so forcibly. — Paine

I'll take that as a "no."

It ‘indicates’ that most of the 80,000 workers were offered $25,000 to quit their jobs. — Wayfarer

Yea. That's a pretty old down-sizing thing. In fact, I think $25,000 is probably a figure from some time in the last century. :grin:

is tantamount to saying:

"Take this chump change or leave with nothing." — Paine

No, it isn't. Are you American?

Doesn't it matter to anyone that Trump is attacking and dissolving essential government services from within? — Wayfarer

That's not what this AP article indicates. It's a voluntary buy-out that's been offered, although $25,000 is chump change for a buy-out. But if someone was going to change jobs anyway, it might be tempting.

In the US a gender gap among voters exist as well. See here: [url=http://]https://cawp.rutgers.edu/gender-gap-voting-choices-presidential-elections.[/url]

So no, you cannot predict what someone thinks but you can predict that when you see a woman it is more likely that she voted for Harris and when you see a man it is more likely he voted for Trump. — Tobias

You're saying that cultural "archetypes" are being represented in different party platforms, and masculine parties are on the rise. You discern from this that feminine values are losing ground and wonder if it's related to a backlash against the successes of the more feminine Left.

Is that about right?

I agree with you, but I think it is not that simple. I wish the far right really didn't worry about such issues. Yet the values far right parties have embraced were all masculine values in which women as a class had little to say and their function was to beget men. Not just men though, men of a particular type favored by 'the nation' whatever that may be. In specific hiring functions it may well be that women are employed that is not the philosophy behind it. They may also employ an immigrant or refugee, yet their policies are consistently anti-immigration usually with some notion of purity or religious preference attached to it. — Tobias

I'm guessing something is lost in translation here. If I were at work at started talking about "feminine values" as described in the OP, I'd have to run behind the corner to avoid being hit by whatever objects are in the environment. You can't predict what a person will value based on what they have between their legs, right?

Well yes, I think it is a symptom, but a symptom of what? And what is the symptom exactly the emergence of the far right or the resentment of many young men? What I am curious about is, is whether traditional analyses of power structures in which the rise of the far right is simply conceived as a pathological reaction to the emancipatory struggle for equal rights, with an analysis a repression of masculinity. — Tobias

The far right is a conglomeration. You're asking if incels are a primary driving force, as opposed to just being attracted to it because of an emotional affinity. I think it's more the latter. Trump has a long history of placing women in critically important roles. He's suggested that he is sexist, but thinks hiring women is beneficial because they feel like they have to work harder to be on equal ground. He recently appointed the first female chief of staff, not because he wanted to put on a show of coddling the poor women of the world because they're helpless and we have to give them a boost, but rather because he liked her style and doesn't give a fuck about the rest.

Really, if I were a woman, I would prefer Trump's approach. Don't treat me like a child who has to be protected. Tell your sexist jokes, grab body parts, but in the end, reward me for kicking ass. The far right does have a point, that when we finally stop worrying that so-and-so is a woman, so-and-so is black, latino, asian, etc., we've finally made progress. I realize that all sorts of toxic stuff gets drawn into that and if someone quotes that without this subsequent acknowledgement, I won't respond.

Interesting that someone who purportedly does not want to "control any markets" guts legislation put in place to protect consumers from all sorts of financial injury knowingly and inevitably caused by certain business practices all of which were possible as a result of a lack of those same regulations. — creativesoul

I don't know. When it comes to trade, Americans are much more heavily regulated that Europeans, or really just about anybody else in the world. This is coming from attempts by Americans to mitigate the worst aspects of capitalism (that it occasionally crashes). Why doesn't anyone else in the world care about that? I'm asking, I don't really know.

I was recently telling another poster about how Bronze Age people thought human action is controlled by external divinities. Another aspect of that is that brave, virtuous actions were usually caused by male divinities. Actions that cause disaster were usually coming from female ones. Line this up with the book of Genesis where a primal female brings sin into the world. Think of the average Disney movie where the arch villain is almost always female, and similar to the role Venus plays in the story of Eros and Psyche. Venus tries to destroy Psyche.

One could argue that this is something structural in the human mind, except there's genetic evidence that Celtic societies were female-dominated. Navajo relationships were at the whims of women, not men. I agree with Nietzsche that good and evil can switch poles depending on a society's underlying agendas, so I don't think it's structural. I think it's a symptom, side-effect, aspect of? certain kind of cultural journeys. It's definitely a whale in the psychic sea, though. It's ancient.

All of them. — Banno

I like the crude oil futures market. As with any free market, the price reflects all the information in the market, things like what season it is, what pipeline was just destroyed, etc. Donald Trump doesn't want to control any markets, in fact he just gutted regulations that were put in place after 2009.

The courts have ben captured, but he cannot capture the market. — Banno

What market?

1) Free will as a concept arose as a response to the theodicy. AFAIK this is just true. As a concept it was never meant to make sense of the human on its own terms, it was meant to make sense of our relationship with god and the world's evil. — fdrake

I have a German friend who's fluent in English and Russian. She read War and Peace in each language and says it's a different book depending on the language. In German especially, she said, it sounds psychoanalytic, like we're looking at unconscious motivations which play out. In Russian, she said it sounds more like each character is propelled by external forces, and that all slavic languages are like this. What a German would speak of as personal property, a Russian says is "upon me."

Moses Finley says the Homeric epics were like Russian depictions. When a goddess showed up on the battlefield to give someone courage, Finley says Bronze Age people really believed that was how it worked. Gods made people do things. Gods invented things like fire, paper, smelting, etc, and gave them to humans..

2) Educated minds started thinking of the will as what is essentially human, roughly equating it with the action of the human soul in the world. {This is me speculating} — fdrake

Maybe as old religions died out, people lost the old explanations for things. So today we would say it's crazy that they thought a god invented paper. We know humans invented it. As we pulled all that creativity within us (as our property), the concept of the human will appeared. The last vestiges of the old way shows up in the way an artist talks about inspiration, as if it's coming from somewhere else.

There is no faculty corresponding to "the will", volitional signals couple with every signal in our nervous systems, and they can be messed with experimentally. — fdrake

All I would say is that we don't fully understand how the universe ends up being conscious of itself. There may be weirdness we don't know about.

it's just that the way people describe free will is a fairytale masquerading as common sense — fdrake

We're saying we're divine. That's Schopenhauer's point in WWR. We're identifying with the forces that move the whole universe when we take responsibility for the simplest thing. Tolstoy was a giant Schopenhauer fan, btw.

I first learned about milankivitch cycles from a library book that was published in 1970. It's ok to talk about the Earth's wobble without mentioning climate change. It's just one of many factors in natural climate change that goes all the way from the water at the equator being close to a boil (thermal maximum at the time primates first evolved) to the entire oceanic surface freezing so that they really aren't sure how life made it through that (that was caused by too little CO2.) That was a real mass extinction. We are not having a mass extinction right now. Not even close. A scientist who specializes in mass extinctions says that people who think we're having a mass extinction just don't understand the term. How's that from climate denial? :joke:

. I think it's quite clear at this point that "free will" as a concept is a theological atavism — fdrake

Do you know of a theory that covers the anatomy and physiology of concepts such as free will and theological atavism?

, what you are stating is the two party system that I'm talking about, which is actually in the minds of Americans. Oh... I have to vote the Dems/the GOP, because a voting to third party candidate would be a vote to the candidate I hate even more.

And then Americans have the idea of primaries. As if the only way for bring change would be through the existing parties. The US just like other countries have only the primary elections. What political parties do is totally dependent on the party works.

And finally the belief in all powerful POTUS. This is the problem. A Republic and a democratic system doesn't work like you elect a King/Emperor for four years, and he'll change everything. But that's what you do have now: a modern day version of emperor Nero. — ssu

Thanks for the lecture. :smile:

I think something more fundamental is going on, they are essentially trying to overthrow the liberal democratic order because they think it was destroying the US. — ChatteringMonkey

The alt-right is diverse, but for some, it's that liberal democracy failed to protect the people, leftism tried to help, but is now fossilized. So it's: 'what do you do about the anti-social aspects of neoliberalism now that leftism is clearly useless?' Think about this from Vance's perspective as a man whose mother was addicted to heroin. The US government knew huge amounts of life-destroying drugs were coming in from the rest of the world. They let it happen. Finally, Canada and Mexico are being forced to help. Why didn't this happen sooner?

So it's real social disintegration driving some of it. Europe is heavily neoliberal, so their goals are now at odds with American ones.

You seem like you're in a vengeful mood. — BitconnectCarlos

Maybe. My point was the Jewish right to Israel will soon be the right to an uninhabitable desert. All the killing will have been vanity.

In a couple hundred years Israel will be a desert due to climate change. Just as there is no state of the Sahara, there will be no state of Israel. It will be a desert for about 2000 years. Jews will move to Canada and Greenland where they will finally be assimilated. The state of Israel and Judaism will be fixtures of history texts.

That is utter bullshit. The Jews lost Israel twice now. It'll happen again. They'll lose it and never get it back again.

I think the Americans could be better served by a total reform of the two party system. — ssu

There is no two party system. It's just that a third party always cripples one of the main two, so there's effort on both sides to avoid fragmentation.

Biden probably couldn't lose face after all the propaganda propping up the war and making it seem like winnable war. — ChatteringMonkey

I don't read the situation that way. Biden was a career politician. He could have backed out in a way that would have made everyone happy. He just wanted to grind Putin into the ground. I think it was personal.

One semi-plausible explanation I've heard is that Putin needed the war to stabilize his position internally... a war tends to call for unity and makes justification for expelling dissidents more easy. — ChatteringMonkey

This is exactly what I thought. He came to power on the heels of a bogus war. War is his friend. But everyone I talked to about it nixed the idea.

Only if the US would flip to Russia's side more permanently, and in that case the US is probably the bigger threat. — ChatteringMonkey

The US administration isn't hawkish, in spite of the talk about taking Greenland and Canada. There's a lot of cognizance of the costs involved in governmental projects. If a tariff would make Canada give up their sovereignty, that would be on the table, in fact Trump publicly floated that.

Europe unites more military, as geo-political forces push it to do now, then we can detter Russia on its own form attacting other countries I would think. We obviously shouldn't be naïve about it, and assume they won't attack, we definitely should detter it with military strenght. — ChatteringMonkey

:up:

To put it in another way, I don't get why people think prolonging this war helps in protecting us from further future Russian aggression — ChatteringMonkey

Honestly, I don't think Biden counted on Putin allowing his economy, society, and military to be laid to waste by the war in Ukraine. That's just such a bizarre thing to do. Or maybe it's just bizarre from an American point of view? There just hasn't been a rational pivot from Biden's hawkish stance.

Yea. I think morality is more about the heart than the mind. I don't know how to translate that into science-speak.

An example is Iago in Othello. Objectively, all he did was steal a handkerchief and tell some minor lies. But we all know that he committed a massive betrayal. He used his wits to bring out the worst in another person. As he said, "Hell and Night must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light.". Hell and Night are both ancient gods from dead religions. That gives them a collective unconscious vibe.

So the intellect will let Iago off the hook. The heart knows he was a destroyer.

You don't see Putin as a future threat to the region?

Did I answer it in the post above you. Sorry, a belated response. — Tom Storm

I don't think so. Also, I think contemporary medicine has defined health pretty thoroughly, so I don't know what to make of that part of the argument.

Ok, but I wasn't responding to Harris or the OP, I was responding to you when you said - — Tom Storm

If you read the article posted in the OP, Harris is saying that it's ok that we don't have a "conceptual definition" for morality because we just sort of know what it is. One would assume from this that he's going the moral relativism route. Instead, he wants to use folk sentiments about morality to prop up some sort of absolute, or in his words, "objective" morality. That's just kind of ridiculous.

My comment to Amadeus was basically that he needs to make up his mind.

Are you reading that article differently?

I understand what you're saying, but that doesn't mesh with the Harris comments posted in the OP.

In this sense, Harris' focus on well-being as a moral foundation is reasonable: it’s not about finding cosmic meaning, but about creating value in our relationships and ensuring that we make life better for ourselves and others. — Tom Storm

Aren't you describing consequentialism? If Harris defines morality as consequentialism, why would he give the opinion that morality doesn't have to have a clear definition in order to be rationally discussed?

When Augustus turned Rome into a dictatorship, he lauded the health of the Roman Republic. They never officially had a revolution.

I think Harris wants to have his cake and eat it too. 'It's a meaningless universe, but you shouldn't do x.'.

We always thought that diplomacy was the main venue to solve disputes (I still think it is), but, sadly, the main superpowers are forcing us to spend a lot of money on the army because we no longer can trust them. — javi2541997

Diplomacy wouldn't work on Hitler.

I refuse! No more benefits for foreigners! — Benkei

That's kind of nationalistic though.

Don't forget China, which probably stands to benefit the most from all of this. — Mr Bee

That's billions of people worth of benefit!

Sometimes and it gets points for reforming sinners. — Gregory

How would you describe that reforming process? Or any kind of redemption?

I don't think the US government has any clear goal at the moment.

They think AGI will land in Trumps term, another wildcard. — ChatteringMonkey

The plot thickens.

k
God almighty came down from heaven to save us from his own wrath by allowing himself to be tortured to death. This strategy worked,
— frank

This does not work because it is against karma and justice to substitute atonment. Get your theology right — Gregory

It gets points for sanity though.