You don't have to politically self-flagellate. — universeness

What?? I ain't into guilt or shame, baby!

Living a satisfactory life yourself need not clash irreconcilably with fighting the good fight. — universeness

Of course not. The one thing has no bearing on the other, as far I'm concerned. You told me to move, after I said my vote doesn't count here. I won't, of course, and so what? My neighbours and I don't talk politics; the flak is all virtual, and avoidable.

The reasons I'm no longer fighting are rational and strategic.

The Luddites were not the dumb joke-butts they're made out to be in modern times, but they made a strategic error: fighting a war they could not win. John Brown, too. Every great cause begins with a few martyrs before it can get rolling properly. One, or a half dozen martyrs are noticed, get put on placards and banners, inspire the troops. But once the revolution has been put down, why line the highway with crucified rebels? I'm opposed in principle to waste.

I will not stay in lonely street at the heartbreak hotel. — universeness

I didn't think it was about personal life-satisfaction. I have no complaint in that department. This is a very good place to live. The air is clean, the corn tall and the hens range free. My neighbours are decent, hard-working, church-going people. And politically so naive that they keep falling for the same lie every four years. The conservatives stroke their prized self-image as righteous individualists and they sign away their power of attorney.

It sounds like you live in and around something which I would consider a pressing enemy camp. — universeness

Which of us doesn't - now?

Seems like your friend employed bad tactics. Writing books seems like a better approach than a 12 gauge and a rusty dump truck. — universeness

All he ever did about was rant and vote.

I just need you to be in support of us humanist/socialist/democrats. — universeness

Insofar as I am able, in a redneck riding that's just returned the conservative incumbent who, every election cycle, promises to improve education, and and consistently votes against the schools, teachers, public service unions, and for every piece of crap legislation aimed at dismantling the social infrastructure painstakingly built by liberals and socialists. But, hey, they give lovely big tax incentives to developers who build unaffordable 4000 sq ft homes on endangered wetlands or plan to automate away another 500 jobs.... but instead close the factory, take their government subsidy and move to Indochina.

I think that deep down, you are screaming and shouting inside your young memory, in support of those Iranian girls Vera. I am not sure your admission of defeat is as final as you project in your typing's. You could still be quite dangerous to those you think, won. You might shove a blunt instrument right up their ..... when they least expect it, if they piss you off enough. — universeness

I had a friend - he's been dead for some years now, so he can't get into trouble - who planned out his one-man revolution with a 12 guage and a rusty dump-truck. Being more a disciple of MLK than Garibaldi, I just write books.

See, it's not that I stopped being angry; it's just that I'm too proud to take up the currently fashionable position that the contest is valid only if I win. I get flak from conservatives for refusing to acknowledge their POV and more flak from progressives for accepting reality. Of course there will be more battles before the human race packs it in for good - conflict is what we do.

Somebody makes a great effort, a great sacrifice, and nobody gets cursed. I like that part - not that poor Beaver died... but in some stories, the one dies trying is translated to heaven as a star or something.
Every human population that ever settled next to a river - where else? the river is transportation, hygiene, cooking water and a source of food - has a big flood in it's memorable past, after which they had to start over from scratch.

Excuse me, but can you give me a hint of how you came to know of the Behaviorist Method of education and training dogs? — Athena

I know more about dogs than I do about behaviourists, and like them a lot more. Whatever is not a good method for humans, is no good for dogs, either. I'm opposed to treating any sentient being like a machine. Yes, I reject professional dog-trainers, advertising copy-writers and political propagandists who use such Pavlovian methods, all for the same reason.

Ever since patriarchy replaced matriarchy women have lived in fear of pissing off the man, but women's liberation has changed that. — Athena

What's that to do with teaching the young civil bahaviour and manners, in order to keep internal conflict to a minimum? I also question the presumed prevalence of matriarchal system in any age. Not their existence, mind - of course, some existed. Humans have tried pretty much every kind of organization at one time or another. The ones that seem to have worked best were egalitarian and consensus-based, but with some specialized areas of responsibility and jurisdiction, rather than dominated by any group based on sex, class, caste or occupation.

It's annoying that so many folks who seemed to have fought the good fight when they were younger, can now only offer some survivalist post-apocalyptic, dystopian prediction of the future of humanity. — universeness

We lost. I'm sorry that my admission of defeat annoys you.

think such a viewpoint is a minority one, especially amongst the global youth. — universeness

I'm sure you're right.

Hopefully, by the time they get to my age or older, they will have found common ground and unison with the youth of America who hate trumpism and evahellicals, and Russian youth who hate Putin, and Chinese youth who hate the fake communist-coloured plutocrats currently in charge there. — universeness

Hopefully.

Seems more forgiving than the other interpretations, — Benj96

I don't think it's about rightness and wrongness in most primitive creation stories. It's more about loss - something we had: a connection with nature, that we traded away for something we wanted: civilization. Once man builds a fire (this is an African story), the other animals are frightened away and hide from him. In another one, man invents language and thereby loses the ability to communicate with other animals. Simple creation stories are just about origins. Here's the Ojibway one: https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/on/pukaskwa/culture/autochtone-indigenous/recit-story - eerily familiar, even though there isn't much chance the Anishinaabe ever met any Mesopotamians - not about sin, which hadn't been invented and wouldn't get here until the missionaries brought it.
Many stories are about destruction, repair and reconciliation. Here's another one that gets around and around the world: http://www.uwosh.edu/coehs/cmagproject/ethnomath/legend/legend9.htm
Of course, these were oral traditions; stories were embellished, adjusted and adapted by each new teller. The North American and African ones were told as instructive tales, not written down and codified for the purposes of an organized religion. I always assumed that the Mesopotamian ones were also much more human before the priestly caste got ahold of them, but that happened something like 4000 years ago, and a lot of rigid, mean-spirited dogma has been layered on top ever since.
(I may have messed up the links)

What we need is a way of producing energy that does not depend on a finite resource, — Athena

We have lots of ways - have had for thousands of years: wind, rivers, tides, sun, ground-heat. Not wasting so much of it would be a good start. Maybe making fewer people - but then, weather, its resultant competitions, and the crash , along with the usual war, famine, pestilence, etc. will take out much of the surplus population. And more efficient living arrangements? Cities are already moving underground; that'll help some people survive.
So, yes, there is likely to be a viable remnant of humans - always assuming, which is a big assumption - there is no all-out nuclear war - and they will likely start some kind of human activity. (Probably killing one another over the last clean pond, which they will contaminate in the conflict.)

The Behaviorist Method is good for training dogs. — Athena

No, it isn't!

How can the post-crash civilization, which is almost 100% guaranteed, have hope without preparing the young for that? — Athena

The best way to prepare them is to teach them elementary survival skills: how to find your way home, how to build a fire, where to dig for water, how to build a raft and a lean-to out of wreckage, how to season termite stew, how to avoid pissing off the big guy sitting next to you.
There are some good books, like https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15798335-scatter-adapt-and-remember

I can only imagine how many kernels of wisdom are out there in the far reaches. Some perhaps still alive but many surely lost to time as well. — Benj96

Fortunately, many endangered and even lost cultures have their advocates in academia. Campbell may have had his detractors, but he did an excellent job of collecting myths and making them available to modern readers. So have several other, more recent scholars.

There's a certain De ja vu to reading of the various cultural, religious and philosophical views - both archaic and modern. A familiarity beneath them all, despite their individual idiosyncrasies — Benj96

I was particularly struck by the similarities between Native North American and African creation myths. Like the god of Genesis, they are all relatably small gods, making worlds with a place just for their own little group of humans... and the humans manage to screw it up by doing the one thing the god warned them against. None of the other gods I know of sentenced anyone to death or banished them or hurt them; the humans just lost some connection with the natural world, or a magical power.

Oh, dear, you do seem to lead a star-crossed life! I'm afraid the only way to cope is write it all down, thinly disguised as fiction. Do, please, change the names! (You can keep the initials. Dibs on Vanessa Millfeather.)
PS Trust me, Webster is even worse - can't spell worth Boston baked beans.

Do we havta do what you feel we can't/shouldn't do? — Agent Smith

Just so you're not flippant about it!

I keep asking her, and she reads, beautiful, interesting, insightful, complex stories, with wonderfully loveable characters, but she reads silently, just to herself. No fun. — god must be atheist

Divorce her!

Alexa, read me a story.

I found out that the creator of the world in native cultures was not the forbidding giant of a monstrous knower, judge and goodness. — god must be atheist

I don't know that one! Can you remember which tribe tells that story? One of the things I like about Native folklore is that it's malleable, adaptable - nothing carved in stone. The other is their sense of fun - playfulness, humour, mischief. The Judeo-Christian tradition is based on enmity toward nature. Adam got tossed out of the nice regulated God-ruled garden into the big ugly hostile natural world, and it's all downhill from there. All of the laws arising from that attitude are about conflict, rule-breaking and retribution, not preservation, harmony and reconciliation. Jesus made a feeble effort to bend it toward the Eastern, more accepting philosophies, but it got co-opted by another militaristic regime and bent right back into the same rigid, punitive system - only bigger.
(May I recommend a book for your consideration? Thomas King is one of my favourite authors)
All that aside, I'd make a lousy Indian - or so an old Indian once told me - because I don't shoot, trap or fish.

Personally, I find both the world-views and ethical systems of pre-urban peoples more to my taste than the legal edifices of civilized societies. The attitudes expressed in the myth and legend of Native Americans resonate with me as Hammurabi's code does not.

Ethics in my book, interestingly, is "sacrifice given by the self to promote others who will propagate the dna derivatives of the sacrifice giver." — god must be atheist

So the founding principle of that system would be "The only good is survival of one's own kind" or "The ultimate good is survival of one's own genetic lineage".
In the former case, all moral precepts would serve the welfare of the tribe - OT style law. It might be enlarged into nationalism under favourable conditions. A great big aggressive religion may arise from it and attempt to include the whole of the species, but, so far, without success. We're still basically tribal.
In the latter, the welfare of the tribe or nation would be secondary, and matter only insofar as it supports one's own immediate kinship group or clan.
From one POV, either system would regard the rest of the world as objects, for use use of the agent and his next of kin, and treatment of them subject only to the agent's emotions, not his obligation.

But then again, reason might take the agent one step farther and suggest that it's not enough to leave DNA to his descendants; they'll also need a world to live in, which thought might lead him to consider preservation of the world part of his obligation to his genetic legacy. Value systems may begin with a single principle, but that principle can start chains and webs of ethical ideas.

The description I've provided is just about the first time I've tried organizing my thoughts on this subject and putting them into words. That has been what I would call a rational process, but it's roots are in experience, not reason. — T Clark

I see. We're talking about different aspects of thought.

You're not describing a new generalization. — T Clark

Of course not. I'm asking why you would need a new generalization in the first place. I'm describing a premise from which a practical, mundane chain of reasoning may start. A situation is identified. Why would it have to be new?
A problem is presented. Information (from observation and memory) is added. Reason is applied.
Either the problem is solved or the chain of reasoning breaks down due to lack of information and the subject fails to solve the problem.

Again, non-rational is not the same as irrational. — T Clark

Okay. How is a real situation in which the subject may find himself non-rational? And why does it matter whether reality follows the rules of this distinction? Suppose reality does throw up a problem that is irrational, or appears irrational to the subject.
"I am standing on a hard, level surface, surrounded by endlessly repeating reflections of myself."
Can he not still apply reasoning to the problem this situation presents?

How do people generate new generalizations from observations? — T Clark

Why can't we suppose that much of the reasoning we do every day begins, not with a generalization generated by the thinker, but by a 'given' circumstance. That, I guess would be empirically observable:

Situation: I am standing on a hard surface in the dark.
Problem: I am not satisfied to stand here until daybreak (Memory has kicked in with two pieces of information: it's night and it usually ends with sunrise)
I don't see any of that as irrational.

agree with this but, as I noted, I think premises are by their nature non-rational, which is not to say irrational. — T Clark

Whatall premises? How so?

Thus, a maximally rational person is someone whose reason reliably tells them about the reasons that there are, and who correspondingly acts and believes as reason bids them act and believe. — Bartricks

Insofar as physical, legal, social and moral constraints allow them to. Sometimes both the rational and reasonable way to act is as unreasonably and irrationally as the people in one's community - else one may find onself in a bonfire without any toenails. Even leaving one's family may be both rational and reasonable - some families are eminently leave-worthy - but a morally bound man won't break his promises.
No human being is purely one type or another, can make all their decisions according the same mode of thought, and everything they do decide is situation-dependent. So, all decisions are likely to be some mixture of rational, ethical, instinctive, emotional and coerced.

Can you briefly summarize these. That may be an unreasonable, although not irrational, request. — T Clark

For what it's worth, I find it quite reasonable and look forward to the response.

Sure, the premises may be wrong, but they also may just be non-rational. — T Clark

That makes no difference to the kind of thinking that is applied to a problem. The whole chain of reasoning may be invalidated at the end by one irrational premise or one false datum along the way, but the process itself is either rational or irrational. Just as the process of smelting is the same whatever the metal. The raw ores going in affect the product, not the process.

There are some topics I avoid because I don't think the discussion will go anywhere useful. — T Clark

I try don't think of forum topics in terms of utility... No, on second look, that's a lie. I do gain something, even from some of the futile, circular ones. Maybe not something practical, but at the very least, brief glimpses into other people's minds. Sometimes it's dark in there - but mostly it's just different.

People have a lot invested in what is considered reasonable or rational and what is not. — T Clark

I suppose... But don't they in just about every kind of opinion and belief? Avoiding all of those subjects doesn't leave much to discuss. The weather, traffic, our children and our dreams...

you can't have thought without Intuition, emotion, imagination, visualization, memory. — T Clark

Just so! Reason is a component of the thinking process (normally) and the result is judged as rational or logical when the conclusion is coherent with the premises and information available. The premises or belief from which the thought begins may be entirely false (religious tenet, cultural assumption) and the information may be incorrect (optical illusion, misuse of language, inaccurate measurement, deliberate lie) and therefore the conclusion derived from them entirely wrong, disastrously wrong, as long as they are internally consistent, the thought is rational.

I thought about starting a thread to discuss the difference between rationality and reason. They seem different to me, but they are considered synonyms. — T Clark

They are, usually, but the derived word 'reasonable' is not synonymous with 'rational'. Reasonableness is a social judgment; rationality is a psychological one.

If thinking is strategic, is it therefore also rational? — Pantagruel

Not necessarily. One may think strategically within a framework of delusion, with internal rules that match no rational sequence in the world of 'normal' people.

Is it possible to be a criminal, and also rational, in the strictest sense of the word? — Pantagruel

Of course. Strict or lax, 'rational' refers to the thinking process, not the aim to which it is directed. Laws are arbitrary and changeable; the decision to break one or more of them can be motivated by any number of rational intentions.

What about reasonable? — Pantagruel

What about reasonable what? Ideation, belief, desire, intention, thought, behaviour? Reasonable from whose point of view? By what standard?

Is ethics rational? — Pantagruel

Yes.

Or is it just rational to be ethical? — Pantagruel

That depends on the individual, his convictions and his circumstances.

No way out of this. Put simply, the physicalist model has to be discarded, or amended. — Constance

Then you'll just have to do that, I guess. How is not my problem; I sleep very well in my physicalist model. Except for the bladder in the middle night thing, but that, too, is insoluble short of death.

Given that the causal relationship is the relational characterization in both cases, the car fender vis a vis the guard rail, and my uncle vis a vis my brain events, then causality itself has to be explained as to its ability to "deliver" my uncle to me. — Constance

No, it evidently cannot be explained to you in any terms that you accept. The problem(s) of Sydney, Henry, the barn and the car are intractable and insoluble.

Bottom line, things are getting better and they are getting worse. Hopefully, as we continue forward, things will be more better than more worse. — Athena

Yes, that is hopeful. Meanwhile, the Proud Boys are marching and the glaciers are retreating, entirely oblivious to each other.
All those previous upheavals in human civilization - including, let us not forget, the complete eradication of previous civilizations - were confined to a locality, affecting no more than one continent at a time. The train we've been collectively seeing approach for the past century and done nothing to avoid, is about to crash into the entire globe at once.
My hope is for the post-crash civilization. (even if it's ants)

It is a problem because your foundational explanatory setting is in no better position to be defended than my uncle. — Constance

Then I will not attempt to defend it.

I'm sorry, neuronal activity did you say? — Constance

You said it first!

But what is this, as I have problematized my Uncle, that is any different? — Constance

It's not different, just a little more holistic, as I attempted to reunify the uncle's electrical impulses with the brain and body in which it takes place, and which it appeared you had overlooked in describing him.

the very thoughts used to construct the rationalization of Henry's distance from neuronal events are themselves "distant". — Constance

I'm sure that's true; you seem to know Henry and I don't.

Rorty put it nicely: How is it that my relation (my brain's) to my uncle any different from a dented car fender and the offending guard rail? — Constance

That depends on how Sydney has offended you.

These really are very good points — Bartricks

Yes.

How absurd is it to say a barn door "knows" what the wind is that howls through its hinges? Why are brains and uncles different regarding this epistemic connection? — Constance

How is an uncle different from a barn door? Sounds like something the Mad Hatter might ask.
I'm more intrigues by why you'd want to go to Wonderland, if it disturbs you so?

Vera! How do any of us know anything!? How? — Bartricks

Just for being difficult, I'm not going to tell you.

Well, that's 1 minute (a.k.a. 100 million years) I am not getting back . Thanks. — Bartricks

Any time, Pilgrim!

Did you read the OP?? — Bartricks

Every non-consequential word, for my sins!

This world appears to have been created incredibly slowly. — Bartricks

It didn't appear that way to the Sumerian storyteller who originated some version of this particular creation myth.

The place described in Genesis is created in 6 days. — Bartricks

It doesn't say how long those days were.

The place described in Genesis contains people whose average lifespan is 900 years or thereabouts. — Bartricks

Just the first few generations after A&E are tossed out of Eden. After that, lives get shorter and shorter, until we get to the louse-infested Middle Ages, after which they start growing longer again. Who knows, in another 1800 years, we might get up to the 900's again.

Vera: oh, but it contains animals. — Bartricks

Both the gods' garden and our present world contain animals, as have all the worlds in between. I don't think their presence is decisive. According to one rumour, in Paradise, they don't eat one another, while in the here here, they do. As far as Genesis knows, in the Garden, food was there for taking, herbs, fruits (except one - oops!) ; no clothes, no dangers, no discomforts, no shame. (Some walled gardens like that exist now, too.) Outside were nettles, thorns, lions and tigers and bears, oh my, and it took hard work to make a living - no unlike our world.

Therefore it is here. Jesus. — Bartricks

Here is where we happen to be. Not my fault - honest! Not Jesus's, either: he just got plopped down in a restless subject nation of the Roman Empire in a volatile phase of its cycle. Some hopeful malcontents took him to be their rebel leader. He wasn't; he was just another peacenik prophet. He got executed anyway. Paul and Peter posthumously repurposed him as The Messiah. Not my fault. Not Jesus's, either. Political expediency. Luck of the draw.

I had a colleague who used to work as a mortuary technician - preparing bodies for autopsy. — Tom Storm

I witnessed a few autopsies and processed the tissue samples afterward. I had a kind of opposite problem for the first year or so: I couldn't help thinking of them as 'patients', people, just like the ones the surgical specimens came from. None of the techs or pathologists seemed to have any social problems. But I had a friend who couldn't face or stomach or somehow accept the notion of being made of slimy, oozy, squishy living components. She insisted she was all white plastic inside her very pretty skin.
It's a very individual reaction, the one we have to corporeality.

But that's the beauty if the human body. We are not only matter (substance) carrying out sterile, cold, dead operations. We are also electricity, warmth, energy - that which invests the matter with sense, with capacities beyond the solely objective, the purely physical. — Benj96

IOW, a gob-smackingly elegant, fragile, complicated, confounding, terrifying and amazing piece of machinery. And all different, to boot!

I have yet to see one ethical problem raised — god must be atheist

It depends on the moral code you follow, which rests on some founding principle.
If it's one of those whose founding principle is: "Pain bad; pleasure good", then its first moral tenet would logically be "Avoid causing pain."
If it's one whose founding principle is that actions rebound on the actor, either by the mechanism of "What you do to others, you do also to your own soul" or of "Whatever you do will determine your next incarnation", then the first rule is likely to be "Do to others as you would be done to".
Both of those moral positions are consistent with mercy on all feeling entities.
The sophistry of some philosophies and religions get around that by designating the vast majority of living as things.
In my code, that's labelling for one's own convenience and is morally unacceptable.