This is a pretty interesting perspective about the future of Russia after Putin.

"Without freedom of speech, we wouldn't know who the idiots are."

Right, it's always been a little intimidating to get a lawyer and claim your rights have been violated. It's dastardly that the executive branch would do this, but other entities do it.

So having neutered Congress by purging it of any non-MAGA members, Trump has now successfully neutered the judiciary, the last bastion against his plainly totalitarian impulses. — Wayfarer

Trump did not neuter the judiciary.

Quite so, and not just with analytic philosophy. The temptation to jump ahead, to overgeneralise, to use the big brush, is great. — Banno

Or make unwarranted assertions.

In the reading, he's talking about theories of meaning that were supposed to be assessed by testing them against language use as we find it. He's saying no fleshed out theories ever appeared, so there's nothing to test. I think the progress he's talking about was just the fleshing out part. People sharpen their wits to express ever more refined versions of the hypothesis and stop there.

Say the professor points to the board with a 2 written on it and says "That's a prime number"

A realist would say the professor referenced a state of the world. Davidson allows us to dispense with propositions and correspondence to understand this. But isn't Davidson's stuff offered as a possibility? There was never any empirical testing, was there?

An anti-realist would emphasize that meaning is use, and truth serves a social function. We don't need to get caught up in trying to understand what the professor is referencing. Reference is kind of poetic anyway. This view is also built on assumptions, and has never been "tested."

I think the conflict is really about two conceptions of the nature of thought.

Thus the construction and assessment of specific truth-conditional semantic theories has almost disappeared from sight in the debate on realism and anti-realism — p.282

This kind of theory would say that a sentence's meaning is its truth conditions, right? I think the basis of that view is intuitive. It might seem that a little ghostly woo explains how sentences relate to truth conditions. Maybe nothing was built because of that?

I think it was quantum entanglement. I'd been curious about which parts of N America will have increased rainfall in 2100. It's the Northeast.

Global temperatures are expected to rise by 2-4 degrees Celsius (3.6-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, according to the Wisconsin DNR.

The US Climate Science Special Report projects that if emissions continue to increase rapidly, the global average temperature will be at least 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 1901-1960 average, and potentially as much as 10.2 degrees warmer, according to Climate.gov.

The United States is projected to experience warming of 3-13 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
This warming will result in more frequent and intense heat waves, with the number of hot days exceeding dangerous conditions expected to increase significantly.

Sea Level Rise:
Sea levels are predicted to rise, potentially by 28-55 centimeters (11-22 inches) compared to current levels, even with carbon neutrality efforts.
The melting of glaciers and ice sheets, as well as thermal expansion of water, will contribute to sea level rise.

Precipitation and Extreme Events:
Changes in precipitation patterns are expected, with some regions experiencing more frequent and intense rainfall and others facing more severe droughts.
The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods, and wildfires, are also projected to increase.

Other Impacts:
Ocean acidification, caused by the absorption of excess carbon dioxide, is expected to continue, posing a threat to marine ecosystems.
The Arctic is projected to experience significant warming and melting of ice, leading to changes in habitats and ecosystems.

The endosymbiotic theory of Lynn Margulis showed that eukaryotic cells arose through bacterial symbiosis, challenging the traditional gene-centric view of evolution and emphasizing cooperation over competition as a driving evolutionary force. — Joshs

It's fascinating, yes. Animal cells probably resulted from archaeal cells that swallowed mitochondria. The theory has been around for a long time that the first complex organisms developed in tidal pools as communities of differentiated cells. I don't think it establishes a priority for cooperation, but yes, it was a turning point in biology when cooperation was highlighted.

Modern biology increasingly views organisms not as discrete individuals but as ‘holobionts’ - integrated communities of host organisms plus their microbiomes. This dissolves the classical boundary between self and environment, — Joshs

This view has been around for decades, but it does not "dissolve the classical boundary between self and environment." It just says that understanding life involves recognizing the concept of a biosphere: a complex set of interdependencies between animals, plants, bacteria, and fungi. You could hardly understand the interactions if you dissolved the boundaries between creatures.

Biology has moved beyond genetic determinism toward understanding development as emerging from gene-environment interactions across multiple timescales. — Joshs

It goes both ways, yes. Life transforms its environment to meet its needs. The environment in turn, transforms genes. The two definitely need to be understood together. Remember that in this, we're looking at the behavior of populations, not individuals. For instance, if we take the wolves out of Yellowstone, the whole environment will change because the wolves' former prey will over consume the vegetation, causing erosion around the creeks, and a loss of habitat for insects, fish, and birds. Just one animal population missing causes the whole scene to change.

But you can take one wolf out of Yellowstone and keep it in a cage. It will be fine. I suspect that what you're doing is trying to take principles about populations and apply them to individuals. It doesn't work that way.

The convergence suggests biology is moving toward what some call a "process ontology" where identity emerges from patterns of relationship rather than essential properties - a view that resonates across these philosophical and scientific frameworks.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ — Joshs

I was driving along one day when all at once, the whole functioning of the circulatory system appeared in my mind at the same time (I'd been studying the heart for a while). It was a stunning vision. It's true that sometimes we get lost in details and can even stray into error from failing to see the bigger picture. This bigger picture is not a philosophical renaissance for biology, though. It's always been there.

The lemon farming anecdote amused me — BitconnectCarlos

That's because there's something wrong with your ability to discern wrong-doing.

but I don't think this is historical, as the Palestinians were displaced from the West Bank, not to the West Bank, in 1967. They largely went to Jordan. — BitconnectCarlos

They came to the West Bank in waves, some of the refugees were living in the West Bank at the time. I'm getting really disgusted by this conversation, so I'm out.

Today’s iron -clad scientific truth will tomorrow’s superstition anyway, — Joshs

This is the lack of flesh I was talking about. My discussion with Pierre-Normand ended up in the same place: a fairly large disconnect between his view and basic biology. Like you, Pierre-Normand said we can take a grain of salt with science, which is fine, just recognize that science is presently very helpful in providing narratives for "an enormous variety of practical" avenues.

Numerous theories of personality and psychotherapy are based on them. — Joshs

That's cool, and you very well may be right, that enactivism is the way forward, but our present biological understanding of organisms actually saves lives on a daily basis. I'm not casting shade on enactivism at all. I'm just saying it's got a ways to go to supplant the scientifically rooted view that presently prevails.

Right. The idea that we only have indirect access to the world through internal representations is a cartesian, reductionist view of emotion, and stands in direct opposition to the enactivist claim that we don’t represent the world via internal schemes but are in direct contact with it by way of our patterns of activity and interaction. — Joshs

I get it, but I think there's a strawman in calling the opposing view Cartesian. I think Robert Rosen is right that biology in its present state is founded on a set of expectations, some of which are apriori. In other words, a little Kant is helpful in understanding what we mean by life. It really isn't Cartesian though. If anything, contemporary biology is a subset of physics.

Frank, I don't remember this conversation where you claimed I laughed. Could you give me a link? — BitconnectCarlos

That would require work on my part. :smile: I told you that when the Israelis forcibly displaced Palestinians from their homes in 1967, many of them went to the West Bank and began lemon farming. The Israelis didn't like the fact that they were surviving, so they diverted the water from their farms. The failed farmers then turned to retail sales in markets, but the Israelis raised taxes on them until they all went out of business. That's how the huge refugee camps started. It's just the truth. Israel created the horrible conditions in the West Bank that led to unrest.

You laughed about the lemons. Please don't redemonstrate your apathy. It's super depressing to hear someone do that.

No, I don't. I think you're misreading me. If you read anger into my posts, that's the reader's error. — BitconnectCarlos

Ok. I guess I just don't get where you're coming from. When I told what Israel did to the Palestinians so that they ended up in refugee camps, you laughed about it, but then you're horrified by the Iranian government. It really seems to me that there's something wrong with your moral compass. Take that for whatever it's worth.

.. Would you agree you have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder? You say more and more outrageous things until someone calls you on it.

The key thing about affect is its character as change of disposition, as a being exposed to the world in a fresh way. That doesn’t seem to be adequately captured by the solipsistic connotations of a mind turning inward towards itself. Affect does the precise opposite, throwing us outside of ourselves by the way it affects us. — Joshs

I was referencing the fact that we model the world and react to the model prior to reacting to the world, but more physiologically, the most powerful driver of emotion is dopamine. Activation of dopaminergic pathways starts within the organism, most fundamentally in architecture contained in DNA.

The relation between affect and cognition has been my thing for a long time, and I’ve collected so much ‘flesh’ for the enactivist view it would make Buffalo Bill proud. — Joshs

I agree that an organism and its environment are intertwined. I don't agree that stasis is an illusion. It's one pole of an opposition. You can't conceive of motion without it.

I don't think there is much flesh connecting any philosophical outlook to an explanation for consciousness because there presently is no explanation for it. All we do is speculate.

Or we could argue that for the most part emotions are the mind interacting with itself. Realizing that has the benefit of a kind of freedom.

I talked to @Pierre-Normand once about embodied consciousness. It's an interesting idea, but far from fleshed out enough to make assertions. You would want to frame it as a possibility that emotion can't be extricated from the organism-environment entity. That's certainly not the only way to view it.

Persia will rise again. — BitconnectCarlos

Ah, but when the Jews do it...well, we can't have that. — RogueAI

I don't feel that way. Israel created a lot of innocent victims and it's spitting on their graves to act like Israel had no choice. Let's just say it: Zionists are assholes. That's not antisemitism. It's the truth.

This is the matter. No one cares about Muslim on Muslim violence. It's only if the Jews dare raise their hand against one of the regional players that all hell breaks loose. 500k killed in Syria by Assad and no one could care less. Iran arrests and beats women to death in their prisons, and you'll see no protests. — BitconnectCarlos

Victim complex.

Many of you here are having a very hard time putting yourselves in Israel's shoes and seeing the culpability of Iran here. If you constantly threaten the annihilation of the strongest kid on the block, and fund terrorist proxies to go after him, and you're now scheming to get your hands on a new big weapon...might the problem be you? — RogueAI

Yes, I get it. What I can't handle is someone (@BitconnectCarlos) suggesting that Israel has been nothing but a victim in all this. That's not true.

Persia will rise again — BitconnectCarlos

Well, he's the president. And we're attacking another country! How do you avoid it??? The NYTimes is solid, though. — RogueAI

I can't right now. Every semi-capitalized comment he makes is news. It's all stream of consciousness like we're in a James Joyce novel.

That was undoubtedly part of it, but remember that almost all of the hijackers came from SA, and we haven't done a thing to them. — RogueAI

Wolfowitz believed democracy would spread outward from Iraq and eventually change SA. He had witnessed this in SE Asia, and so thought would happen in the Middle East as well.

The nonAmericans here don't understand this. They think Trump and Americans are just itching to take out Iran. — RogueAI

I can see why it would be difficult to grasp that American involvement is really just that Trump saw Israel winning and wanted to get in on the victory feels.

Instead, we're looking at what Trump is doing like someone watching a horror movie with their hands over their face. — RogueAI

:grin: I read the NY Times, but I avoid news otherwise. I just don't want to hear about Trump.

do you think they still would have been invaded? — RogueAI

I think the US knew Saddam couldn't back down. After the war, Wolfowitz explained that the point was to democratize the Middle East starting with Iraq. That was supposed to basically give al Qaeda what they wanted, so no more 9-11 style attacks.

All that thinking is in the past now. I don't think Trump entertains any middle eastern strategy.

Feelings aren’t inner senses sprinkling their subjective coloration over experiences , but activities, doings. They are our ways of being attuned in situations, the way things strike us. — Joshs

A feeling is an activity?

You can change the way things "strike" you. You can influence your emotions through will (up to a point), while your actions stay the same.

neocons — Mr Bee

What neocons? Who are you talking about?

Your somewhat literal interpretation might miss the point that what a city is like is dependent on what one chooses to do in that city. — Banno

I just think when a person asks what it's like to live in a city, they're asking how it feels to live there. You'd want to help them connect it to feelings they already know about. Wouldn't you want to describe scenes, rhythms, tastes, colors, etc? Compare and contrast to other locations? Yes, you probably gathered that information by doing things, but that seems incidental. Consciousness is filled with feelings, right?

The moving cities analogy is interesting. I think we can take it a bit further. Let's consider the question, "What's it like to live in Kansas City?" This frames the issue as if there were only one way to live in Kansas City. but of course what it is like to live in Kansas City is not a thing, but a series of choices and interactions - do you stay in your flat, or do you go out and explore the parks? Do you join a choir, or a bike club? Do you get to know your neighbours, or keep to your old relationships?

The analogy holds when we consider changes in fundamental beliefs. it's not about what is the case, so much as what you do next. As such there is no answer to "What's it like to live in Kansas City?" apart from what one choses to do in Kansas City. — Banno

If someone asked what it's like to live in Kansas City, I would imagine they're asking what the people are like, what the local culture consists of, the natural environment, etc.

If you answered with: "I drive on a giant highway to get a giant steak and potato" I think your listener would wonder about you. In other words, you'd have to spout out a huge number of personal anecdotes to convey what you could easily express with descriptions.

That's right, Frank. How dare the Jews want to have their own land in their ancestral homeland. I agree -- that's much of what it comes down to. Why can't they just happily subject themselves to Arab rule? The Arabs play nicely. They are merciful rulers with a record of fair treatment towards their minority populations.

How dare those Jews assert themselves? If only they knew they are less, there would be no problems. Their place is under the Muslims. Under the Arabs. And how dare those Nazi Zionists challenge this fact. — BitconnectCarlos

It's all short term bullshit. Israel will be a footnote in the history of the 20th Century. A terrible mistake.

The nice, left-wing Israelis failed, thus you get Likud. — BitconnectCarlos

This is completely untrue. The intifadas were a response to Israeli invasion, occupation and control of the West Bank and Gaza. To characterize the behavior of the Israeli government during that time as "nice" is nauseating. Israel did everything it could think of to make life hell for the Palestinians in the occupied territories. They clearly wanted the Palestinians to either die or leave, and they did neither.

You're making up your own history so you can imagine that Israel is a victim. It's not. The reason there hasn't been peace in the region is very simple. It's Zionism. This is not a indictment of Judaism. It's just about a couple of generations of absolute evil bastards who happen to be Jewish. Their time will pass and they'll be forgotten. Then there will be peace.

We have tractors.

Is Finland on fire?

Yea, well your culture sucks too.

Self sufficiency is smart thing to prepare if there is crisis and the sea routes for trade are blocked. — ssu

Tell that to Thoreau.

Interesting, thanks! Isn't there a concern that blowing up nuclear materials will pollute the area?

.
Self sufficiency is an old American thing. You're free to the extent that you're self sufficient, so pulling back from the world stage, increasing tariffs to promote American industry, basically building a wall around America, all that makes sense at a deep level to the archetypal American, out on the range, living off trapped rabbits and wild onions. And coffee. Lots of coffee.

Third option, I project build, welcoming your dissection, to produce a well tested product.

Except not here. Resisting it not on any principle but respecting the thread is maybe not the place. — Fire Ologist

Fair enough.

This thread is about the process. Or types of processes. — Fire Ologist

What I see is all the emotion involved. Project builders love their projects. There's something a little sadistic about dissection.