Peter Zeihan on NATO provocations:

https://youtu.be/gbr3CiOhTO8

I keep hearing that if Ukraine would have just committed to neutrality, or the West would not provide arms, all would be well. Would it? I am not so sure.

In case you didn't see this interesting prediction by Oleksiy Arestovych from 2019:

https://youtu.be/DwcwGSFPqIo

Also, I've been finding the comments by Vlad Vexler interesting. The titles are a little sensational. Don't let that put you off. Some of his analysis is really interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/c/VladVexler/videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn7XHZiW6EUgSuxItybLLMg/videos

It IS of course about money.
— Olivier5

How? — Agent Smith

https://youtu.be/If61baWF4GE

I don't know if this video has already been linked to in this thread, but just in case it hasn't, here it is. It is a MUST WATCH! It explains better than anything else, in a short time, what this is really all about. Hint: it isn't about Nazis. :wink: It is about what these things are usually about. The video is slightly dated now, but still clarifies the situation greatly. Everyone should see it!

https://youtu.be/If61baWF4GE

Many of you seem pretty well-informed about what is going on in Europe. What do you think of the future of Slovakia? Any opinions? Is it safe? Is it likely to come under Russia's umbrella soon? Might internal politics cause it to leave NATO and swing toward Russia? I have a loved one there and have been planning to move there from the USA. Thoughts?

I've used weed too many times to count, mushrooms on maybe a dozen occasions, once as much as 10 dried grams (don't remember the peak at all and found it surprising that I was finding myself as a human with a name while coming down), LSD a handful of times, morning glories via a cold water extraction maybe ten times, and salvia divinorum dozens of times. I've been addicted to caffeine, ephedrine, alcohol, and tobacco. I also experienced nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair as a kid (my first altered state!), and anaesthetics a few times with surgeries (altered state during brief transitions). I also had a few rounds of prescription opioids.

I am ambivalent about weed. It is interesting, but tends to make me paranoid or often sad and overly nostalgic. The temporary short-term memory impairment is really disorienting and limits its usefulness. Weed always makes me feel guilty, like I am doing something to myself and my mind that I shouldn't be doing.

Psychedelics gave me some of the most important and amazing experiences of my life, but also led to a serious three day psychotic break once (from a combination of LSD, sleep deprivation, and holotropic breathing) in which I thought I was God, shaved my head skin-bald, almost hurt myself in a hundred ways, and embarrassed myself substantially.

I went to something like Heaven once on morning glories (carefully prepared) while listening to Mozart's Requiem on headphones early in the morning with sunlight filtering through my closed eyelids. That was the most beauty and joy I've ever known. Profound! I also experienced the most bleak and dark state I've ever known with morning glories once.

Salvia is the weirdest and most radical thing I've ever experienced. 16 years later, I still puzzle over what I experienced on it. I had many experiences in which it seemed like I was switching to the perspective of someone else in the past, living an alternate life scenario, a very mundane and believable situation, and strangely always before my own lifetime, and usually in an agricultural setting. I even saw a big wall gridded with portals into these seeming alternate lives. When I approached one, I became enveloped in that identity for a bit and felt the feelings of that person. It was a bit like Being John Malkovitch. Weird!

I haven't done psychedelics in 15 years or so.

I am not sure if drugs have been good or bad for me overall. It is hard to know how I would be if I had never used them. I wonder sometimes if I am a bit scarred and less functional because of them. Certainly though, it was in my nature to explore them. I did get burned a bit though, perhaps like Icarus. I even seriously sunburned my newly bald head while trying to fly while psychotic that time, so much so that my scalp was oozing afterward.

I've long wanted to try DMT, 5-meo-DMT, MDMA, mescaline (peyote maybe), ayahuasca, and ketamine, but given that psychotic episode, I am not sure it is wise for me to experiment further. Probably a bad idea!

Can truly separate things interact?

Is it ethical to purchase factory farmed animal products and fund this? — Down The Rabbit Hole

No. Still, I do. Guilty.

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise

Eternity, by William Blake

Imagine two versions of the world identical with the exception of one difference. In version A, a child is being tortured, her head being slowly crushed in a vice. In version B, she is happy and healthy, swinging on a swingset with friends. Is one of these versions of the world better than the other? Is this simply a question of my preferences, my conditioning, or anything like that?

After more than 50 years, I can imagine being a little tired of music. Maybe doing something else and discovering something new is in order.

I am just a beginner at making music, only a couple of years in, still discovering the fundamentals. So there is still a lot of mystery and sense of possibility in it for me. I am starting late, 43 now, and so music is a change of interest for me.

I tend to lose interest in things when I cease to see mystery in them. I used to be obsessed with painting, but once I felt I understood it and the "great" painters of the past ceased to seem like gods, I mostly lost my verve.

I have enough good music on my shelf to listen to until the day I die (including all 9 Radiohead CD's), so why should I spend time creating anything new? — TheQuestioner

Creating music or art isn't simply about turning around and consuming it or just about the end-product. It isn't only about the consumptive aspect. It is about the very process of creating, the joy of discovery, the immersion in the feelings as you express them.

I am obsessed with making music and can't stop messing with it even though I have no anticipation that anyone else will ever care. Much of it, if not most, I don't even want to expose to others. It is better than doing crossword puzzles, for sure! I experience a lot of joy just expressing something and experiencing the rich qualities of the sound I am shaping as I am shaping it, in a feedback loop of feeling-expression.

Imagine that someone questions the value of speaking with their own words and thoughts because there is enough of that from others to read or hear for a lifetime! Seems absurd, doesn't it?

I simply don't understand having no interest in creating. Just consuming has never been enough for me in any aspect of life. I need to participate, to play, to try my own hand, to discover what I have in myself. I don't need others to validate that in order for it to be worthwhile. Who are these others to judge my value anyway? If I depend on their favorable opinions, I am lost.

If your aim is money, music is probably not for you. The same goes for philosophy. The chances of making it big are tiny.

Personally, I see things like money as but a means to support my life to make it possible for me to spend time in creative play, relationships, reflection, enjoying nature, and so on. These things are the ends to which the practical things are but a means. They are the sorts of things that make life worth living, that give civilization its very purpose. Money is not a worthy end in itself. It is but a means to support such ends.

Some artists hope to make money from art mostly so that they can spend most of their time doing it, because they love it, because just creating is the most desired thing. They want what they love to be a self-supporting activity. Such people, even if they can't make money at it, will still be hungry to do it and will do it when they can, assuming their job doesn't kill their creative spirit and spend all their energies.

It's relevant. Whatever the theory, whether naive realist or whatever, it must take into account and explain the difference between seeing black and not seeing.

I suppose the naive realist would have to try to say that blackness is truly what a lack of light looks like, in itself. You are truly seeing that there is no light. But I am not sure this really makes sense. If you experience only and directly the things out there themselves, I don't know how you could really experience an absence of something. It seems to me that if what you experience is directly just objects themselves (light in this case), if something is there, you'd see it, but if nothing is there, you wouldn't see anything, not even blackness. You would likely only experience what is present, not any kind of absence. And blackness is an indication of a known negative.

Personally, I think naive realism is wrong. Perhaps our seeing of black is one of the many challenges it faces.

Take care to notice that seeing black and not seeing are two very different things. Blind people don't see black. Phenomenologically, blackness is a color quality in itself.

Another thing to be aware of here is that in terms of the information you have, when you see black, you know that you are definitely NOT detecting photons from that location. If you are blind, you lack this knowledge. This is probably why you don't have a sense of blackness when blind or trying to see via your hand or the back of your head. Where there is no information, there are no qualities at all.

good because they naturally follow their natures — Gregory

Something being good does not follow from it being natural.

Consider a case of a male animal killing the young of a mate when the offspring are not his. I remember seeing a nature documentary where a male zebra stomped baby zebras to death that were not his own. This is common. Human males have done this on occasion as well. Humans often behave without much moral consciousness according to primitive instincts. It might be argued that this behavior is instinctual and therefore natural. But is it good?

Goodness doesn't follow from naturalness. See the appeal to nature fallacy.

You might say that animals are not really morally conscious and that, knowing not what they do, and being slaves to instinct, they are blameless. But saying that they are good because they follow their instincts is a bad argument.

They are not capable of doing true evil, they did not ask to exist, and they are good because they naturally follow their natures.

It might be argued that if animals can be good, then surely they can also be evil, or that conversely, if they cannot be evil, they also cannot be good, as these are two sides of a coin. Both depend on the same moral capacity. I find it strange that right off the bat, you make them innocent of evil, and yet you credit them with goodness. Also, what does their not asking to exist have to do with it? We humans didn't ask to exist either! And any God or god, if such exist, surely also didn't ask to exist. It seems to me to be impossible to ask to exist, as you would then have to exist before you exist. If not asking to exist makes you innocent, then all are innocent. But I don't see how it follows.

Regardless of my objections here, you could still probably reasonably argue that the world involves much suffering on the part of innocents, and that this suggests that God isn't perfectly good.

One possible objection is that this is the best of all possible worlds. Maybe better worlds that we imagine actually couldn't work and would involve violations of the law of noncontradiction somewhere, or something of the sort. If the lives of animals were so different, it is easy to see that we wouldn't be as we are. Humans would be an impossible result of a world set up so differently early on. God would then have to "cheat", essentially to make the world a lie, in order to get what he wants without some of the negatives that might necessarily go with that.

Maybe the world, even with its natural evils, overall has positive value.

Here is another possibility. What if God isn't separate from the world, as in pantheism or panentheism or something like cosmopsychism? Maybe God is all that is. And so maybe God isn't causing any suffering to any another being. Maybe God does it all to himself for some purpose voluntarily. Maybe God is all the animals! Maybe those are even experiences he wants to have! What then?

The distinction between a human and an animal is not as great for me than it is for a theist. Animals kill and eat each other. Therefore I believe we can do the same, although we are evolved enough to be capable of understanding that we should cause the least suffering we can for other species — Gregory

This is another fallacious appeal to nature. Many of the worst things humans do could be argued to be instinctual or natural and to have some precedent in our pre-human past or in other animals. Take rape for example, or murder, or infanticide, or cannibalism, or war, or theft, or lying, and on and on. If it is okay to appeal to nature, you might argue that there is no such thing as non-nature, and that all human behavior is really natural or instinctual, and that all human actions are therefore okay. But are they? Aren't some actions to be preferred to others?

What you are saying here sounds to me like we are not so different from sharks so it is therefore okay for us to behave like sharks.

We are very different from sharks! We know what we are doing! Do sharks have any understanding that biting animals hurts them? We do. We full well know the horrors of meat production, and we eat it anyway. We, unlike the shark, systematically cause this suffering knowingly. I would suggest that this makes us far less innocent than the shark. I don't see why being atheist would get us off the moral hook here.

I agree with much of your thinking here! It is especially helpful that you make a distinction between the different senses of the word consciousness. When discussing consciousness, people are often talking past one another since they have different things in mind.

There are a couple of things I would like to hear your thoughts on. The first is something I often puzzle over and which might pose a challenge for your view. Supposing that we do have phenomenal consciousness, that we aren't just talking nonsense, how is it that we are able to form thoughts about it and report it through behavior? If I understand your position correctly, it would seem that this phenomenal consciousness would have to be epiphenomenal. The only causes here are the physical causes. There are no mental causes over and above these. So behavior is fully accounted for by the physical causes. Any mental causation would involve overdetermination.

Imagine that there are two kinds of dominoes, sensitive ones, or S-dominoes, which subjectively experience the impacts, and zombie dominoes, or Z-dominoes, which have no phenomenal aspects at all. These two kinds of dominoes are otherwise identical. All their physical properties are the same. If arranged in a certain way, both kinds will impact and fall in the same way. There is no possible way of arranging them and knocking them down that would reveal whether or not they are S-dominoes, even if you arrange them as a complex computer using very large numbers of dominoes. Their behavior, in other words, contains no information about any phenomenal aspects they might have.

It seems to me that this phenomenal consciousness that all physical things are said to have doesn't do any causal work. If the very phenomenality here doesn't have any causal power, how does our brain state come to refer to it? How do we come to have thoughts about our phenomenality? How do we come to talk about it? It is, after all, the underlying micro-physical causes that determine the brain states and therefore the structure of our experiential states. Adding a phenomenal aspect to physical interactions doesn't seem like it would alter the world structurally.

Phenomenal consciousness is perhaps best defined in distinction from what it is not. It is not anything to do with any behavioral properties of a thing. — Pfhorrest

How then do we have thoughts about it and behavior that refers to it, your post for example?



The second thing I am curious to hear your thoughts on is the binding or combination problem. Our brains are very complex arrangements of matter, seemingly with many small parts. But our conscious experience is bound together into a single whole. Notice, for example, that the experience of depth in visual perception requires that something going on in the right hemisphere is bound together with something going on in the left hemisphere.

To see the color red, it must be that you are detecting red light AND NOT green light AND NOT blue light. This requires a number of cone cells and neurons. It is not enough that red-sensitive cones are activated, since they are also activated when you see white, in which case all three cone types are activated. To see yellow, you must be detecting red AND green AND NOT blue. It is not enough that red and green are both activated, as it must be that blue is also NOT activated. Integration is required.

I once built a virtual logic circuit to model RGB color distinctions. The output of each logic gate is only a 1 or a 0. It is never redness or greenness. Similarly, in the brain, it is just neurons firing. And action potentials don't carry color. Even if everything going on in the brain were to somehow ultimately feed to a single neuron, it would only be a matter of that one neuron firing or not firing. The signals coming into that one neuron wouldn't be qualitatively different from those coming into a neuron receiving a signal directly from a cone cell in the retina.

Somehow, what is going on in a bunch of seemingly separate physical objects across different regions of the brain and even maybe parts of the environment must come together as one thing.

From a Chalmers paper:

The most influential formulation of the combination problem was given by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1895). In criticizing “mind-dust theory”, on which mental states are held to be compounds of elemental mental states, James made the following observations:

"Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, the case is in no wise altered. Take a hundred of them, shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each remains the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belonging to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feeling would be a totally new fact; the 100 original feelings might, by a curious physical law, be a signal for its creation, when they came together; but they would have no substantial identity with it, nor it with them, and one could never deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible sense) say that they evolved it. Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. We talk of the ‘spirit of the age,’ and the ‘sentiment of the people,’ and in various ways we hypostatize ‘public opinion.’ But we know this to be symbolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several individuals whom the words ‘age,’ ‘people,’ or ‘public’ denote. The private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind."

James is here arguing that experiences (feelings) do not aggregate into further experiences, and that minds do not aggregate into further minds. If this is right, any version of panpsychism that holds that microexperiences (experiences of microphysical entities) combine to yield macroexperiences (experiences of macroscopic entities such as humans) is in trouble.

How is this possible? How do all the little "observations" that are all the microphysical interactions add up to such a bound-together experiential whole, even if it is just a momentary whole?

This kind of wholeness is puzzling. I intuitively tend to think that if something is to have complex structure, it must have parts, and those parts must be separable. In other words, it is a collection of many smaller things. What makes it possible to shape clay also makes it possible to cut it into many tiny pieces. This seems to be a case not of many things being one thing, but of many things simply being near each other and in a certain arrangement. And if something is to be truly whole, truly one thing, it seems to me that it should be a mereological simple. Mereological nihilism seems intuitive to me. But our conscious states seem to be a single whole and yet also have complex structure.

How would this pan-proto-experientialism deal with the combination problem?

When we see people suffering, is it always because they did something bad and so deserve it?
— petrichor

I don't think so. — Tzeentch

I'm relieved!

Goodness is one prerequisite for happiness, but it is not the only one. Wisdom is another, for example. — Tzeentch

So it sounds like goodness and wisdom are conditions of happiness but not guarantors?

This is beginning to sound more reasonable that what I thought you were thinking!

Yes, this has been demonstrated and the effect of paralyzing agents has been isolated from that of anaesthetic agents. Its called the Tunstall isolated forearm test — debd

Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for pointing it out!

However when anaesthetic agents are administered, even though it does not reach the forearm, the patient is unable to follow the command to move fingers because his consciousness gets impaired by anaesthetics agents in a dose dependent manner until he finally loses consciousness. — debd

That's a clever test, and it is suggestive of a loss of consciousness, but I can imagine many ways in which there could still be an experience of some sort happening even when there is a failure to report awareness with finger movements. Even if I am only dreaming, I cannot obey a request to move my fingers. Experience under anesthesia could be very distorted or dissociated, and this could explain the inability to act. Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis? It is pretty disturbing! When this happens to me (rarely), I become quite "awake", but I cannot move a muscle, no matter how hard I try. I can't even open my eyes. After maybe ten minutes of this, something unlocks and I become able to move. I don't know for sure what the mechanism of paralysis during sleep is, but I am guessing the place where motor impulses are blocked isn't in all the peripheral nerves. It is likely in the CNS.

Regardless, the details here are beside my point. We're getting lost in the weeds. For what I was trying to convey, it doesn't really matter whether we really feel pain under anesthesia or not. It was just a way to illustrate a more general idea, that a lack of report of experience doesn't necessarily mean there is no experience. And for my purposes here, memories of experiences are a sort of report.

I find it very interesting that there are situations like the split brain where the mute right hemisphere can't answer for itself, can't report its experience, unlike the left. I am led to wonder what might be going on in the brain that we think is unconscious, but is rather just unable to report its experience. Certain brain regions could be basically just segregated from the parts of the brain that can speak.

We could think of different regions of the brain network as like different people in certain positions in a company. Suppose you have an executive who makes big decisions and talks to the public and who receives various reports from assistants who gather data and so on. Suppose there is an assistant who provides visual information. The executive might think she knows about everything going on there, but maybe not. Maybe that assistant only presents the finished product to the executive, while privately experiencing the whole process of assembling those presentations. The executive might only experience what is handed off to her by the graph-maker. There may be other people who do other jobs that support the overall operation of the company, but who remain largely unknown to the executive. But they might still experience what they do. And they might communicate with people other than the executive. All of this might involve conscious experiences. But the only things ever reported to the public are what the executive has access to and decides to report.

Do you see what I mean? You might be such an executive. And you might share the same skull with other conscious entities who have internal processes that you are unaware of, but who experience their own operation.

This sort of thing could extend out to the wider world in general. We, as the executive parts of a brain, are only aware of what is happening in that part of a brain and of what neighboring parts report to us. But there is likely much more in the world that involves its own experience. We are perhaps stuck in yet another kind of Copernican delusion, thinking that we occupy a privileged position, that we are the only places in the universe where experiences happen.

The idea that goodness produces happiness, and badness produces misery. — Tzeentch

But is it true that this always occurs? Do good people always end up happy? Do bad people always end up unhappy? When we see people suffering, is it always because they did something bad and so deserve it?

True happiness is the great equalizer, because it comes only to those who truly deserve it. — Tzeentch

What is it that ensures that good people are happy and bad people are not?

Should we fear death? Even absent an afterlife, or maybe even especially absent an afterlife, I'd say no. Fear of death would be justified if Hell were real and there were some chance of ending up there. But I am sure that's nonsense.

I subscribe to something along the lines of Daniel Kolak's open individualism or Arnold Zuboff's universalism (there is only one universal experiencer which has all experiences everywhere and at all times), and so I don't think the death of this body will mean the end of my experiences, being rather just a temporal boundary on this particular window through which I see part of the world. But even if I were a closed individualist (the default view most people have about personal identity, whether they believe in a soul or afterlife or not, in which each person is a truly distinct subject) and believed the death of this body to be the end of myself, I don't think oblivion is something I should fear, as I won't be there to regret my annihilation. The lead-up to it could be something worth fearing however.

Regardless, I do in fact fear death. And I find it hard to explain exactly why. At the same time, it is sometimes attractive. There is ambivalence. Eros and Thanatos?

Assuming closed individualism, if I could press a button that would instantly end my experiential life without any pain, and would replace my consciousness with an automatic program that would go on to finish my life for me as a P-zombie with nobody else being the wiser, so that I don't have to worry about hurting others, would I press the button? There are times when I would be tempted. But I would hesitate! I have doubts that I could ever go ahead and press it. It would be nice to have such a button in my pocket though, just to know that the option is always within reach should things become unbearable.

It would seem that fear of death is probably at least partly instinctual. Organisms that aren't motivated to struggle to preserve themselves will quickly be selected out.

A book I'd highly recommend is Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. The fear of death might explain much more of human behavior than we normally recognize.

What problems are there with many individual bobs in many individual rooms rather than one universal Bob — khaled

Maybe later. Addressing this matter in a satisfactory way would require some time and effort, and I am a little overwhelmed and unmotivated at the moment. Really, it probably should be handled in another thread. If I find the time and muster the will to try to lay out the arguments, I'll post a new thread and bring your attention to it.

In the meantime, if you are interested, the position I am basically advocating is called open individualism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism

There are a number of things to read here on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenIndividualism/wiki/reading

Why do we experience different things then? — khaled

When you ask why "we" experience different things, this still sounds like it assumes multiple experiencers. Experiencer A experiences X and experiencer B experiences Y. There are not multiple experiencers. Rather, the one experiencer experiences both X and Y. Let's say that X is the experience of being "me" and Y is the experience of being "you". The one experiencer experiences both X and Y at the same time.

But why don't we know that we are both? That's what seems to beg for explanation. If you are also me, why don't you know it? The answer lies in information integration, or a lack thereof, as I noted earlier. It is a matter of what information is accessible at a given location. In your brain, the one experiencer simply has no access to the memories in another brain. The memories in this other brain are instead over here, and are accessed by the one experiencer here in this brain, not there in that one. The one experiencer has access to those memories only at that location. It doesn't have access to both sets of memories in one brain. In order for that to happen, your brain would somehow have to contain the memories of two brains.

What I am getting at might start to make more sense when we bring time into this. Consider that you intuitively think that the one experiencing being you now is the same one that experienced being you five seconds ago. Why does this seem to be the case? It is because you remember. Your current brain state contains information about those past brain states. But your earlier brain state did not similarly contain information about this current one. In it, there was no sense of being the current you in the same way you now feel that you were once it. There is a sense in which you know your identity with your past body-self while not feeling the same way about your future body-self. You have no memories of your future brain states. Causation does not work that way. So there is a temporal asymmetry.

When you reach out in your mind for knowledge of your past self, memories come. When you reach out for knowledge of your future self, you come up empty. Similarly, when you reach out for knowledge about what it is like to be me, you come up empty, and for a similar reason. In both these empty-handed cases, you lack the knowledge because information does not flow that way. Despite this lack of information, that which experiences being you now is identical with that which experiences being you a minute from now. And similarly, despite the lack of information in your brain about my brain state, that which experiences your brain state is identical with that which experiences mine.

That which has the experiences is one. The seeming rift between the two experiences is a result of the fact that nowhere is the information in both brains being integrated in a significant way. There is no experience that takes the form of such an integration.

Consider the amnesiac I mentioned earlier. Let's call him Bob. He can't remember anything from one minute to the next. We place him in a room and have him make notes on a chalkboard in that room about what he experiences. We show him things. He makes notes. We then ask him questions. He consults the board and tells us what he has seen. This chalkboard is his memory. But suppose we move him to a different room with another chalkboard, let's call it room B, the first room being room A. In room B, we show him different things and he makes different notes. But if we ask him about things he experienced in room A, he comes up empty-handed. In room B, he simply lacks access to information about experiences in room B. But the critical point of this scenario is that Bob's inability to integrate information between the two rooms is not evidence of two distinct experiencers. The experiences in both rooms are had by the same guy. But neither of the rooms contains information about what was experienced in the other.

Our two brains are analogous to these two rooms. The difference is that the subject experiencing both of them isn't moving from one to the other. It experiences them both perhaps simultaneously. It just lacks a way of fully integrating the two. These two brains would have to be tied together as part of a bigger brain or some such in order for that kind of integration to happen.

There might be somewhere in the world or in time where the experience of being your brain and the experience of being mine get integrated and there is knowledge and memory of both at the same time in basically the same place. Consider Bob again. We have rooms A and B with their limitations. But suppose that room A and room B both contain cameras fixed on their chalkboards and this video from both rooms is then fed to a screen in a third room, C. If we take Bob to room C, from this vantage point, he "remembers" everything he saw in both room A and room B! But if we take him back to room B, he knows nothing of room A or room C. So from A, he knows only A. From B, he knows only B. From C, he knows A and B. He can report experiences had in A from either A or C, but not from room B.

It could be that in the future, through some advanced technology, our brains will be linked together, and an experience might then be had of my memories being integrated with yours and of the seeming difference between our identities dissolving. What would that feel like? I don't know! It surely wouldn't feel like there are two distinct subjects uncomfortably occupying the same double-brain. Maybe there would be a sense of realizing that there had never been two separate subjects in the first place.

There is some level of integration happening between our brains though right now just because of communication and other forms of physical causation where we impact one another. So, in this brain, I have access to a little information about your brain state. But the bandwidth is very low!

It is hard to imagine that one subject could be experiencing multiple perspectives at once without "knowing" it until you really digest this idea of information integration or lack thereof.

Returning to your question:

Why do we experience different things then? — khaled

"We" don't. In reality, there is no "we", if by that we mean a plurality of subjects. And there is really just one big experience that includes the lives of everyone and everything. That experience has a certain structure, this structure reflecting the laws of physics and information and logic. The form of this experience is such that some parts of it simply don't refer to some other parts, and that's all the seeming gulf between us really amounts to.

The truly hard thing to explain is something hard to explain no matter what stance you take metaphysically, and that is why there are differences in the world at all, why there are many things, why there is form at all, why there is "something" instead of nothing, why there is broken symmetry, why there is information. It is the great problem of the one and the many. I don't know quite how to approach it. But I sometimes suspect that if things are seen sub specie aeternitatis, or under the aspect of eternity, there is perhaps no broken symmetry at all. At the level of the whole, seen from no particular perspective, perhaps there is NOT something rather than nothing. Maybe it is really nothing. Maybe taken all together at the same time, every pair of opposites cancels and there is no form whatsoever. The whole of everything, after all, is not related to anything else. Form implies relation and relations belong only to parts. Maybe it only seems like there is something "from the inside" so to speak, when the whole is seen from a partial perspective. Maybe the world is almost a kind of delusion, a case of cosmic dissociative identity disorder.

*shrugs*

Without going to great lengths, I don't know how to convince you that there is just one universal subject. I arrived at that position after thinking fairly intensely for a long time about a lot of issues. It solved a whole bunch of problems in one fell swoop. It is the only answer that really works, as far as I can tell. When it dawned on me, many things suddenly fit together and clicked. I don't have much doubt about it any longer. Some questions and puzzles remain, but this position minimizes them. To try to communicate the way it all sits in my mind though would be a daunting task. It would almost require me to put you through a similar history of thinking. I would have to get you to feel the weight of a bunch of other philosophical problems and then show how this idea solves them all neatly.

I get frustrated because no matter how I present the position in a forum post, it just sounds weird or silly, probably because it is such a counter-intuitive idea. I despair of the fact that to really get it across in a remotely convincing way would probably take a book.

Have you considered Schopenhauer's position here? He was one of those who realized (correctly, in my opinion) that there is only one universal self or experiencer, and that it occupies all perspectives. "Occupies" is a bad choice of word though really, since it isn't that there is something separate from the world that is somehow inserted into it to experience it. Rather, this one universal experiencer is the very world itself.

The way you are thinking about this matter suggests that there are a number of separate and discrete selves in the world. There are not. If you analyze it, any notion of true individual selves, whether soul-based as in Christian metaphysics, or materialist, falls apart. It just doesn't work.

I'd have to dig in Schop's writings to find a passage that expresses the sort of view I am attributing to him, and I'm feeling lazy at the moment. I don't remember where to look exactly. Maybe later.

Much of what I'll say here isn't from Schopenhauer.

It isn't that you could not have been someone else. Instead, you, the real you, the very base-level experiencer, the universal self, actually are all people and all things at all times. It is not that John is Joe. No, that would be silly. That suggests that inside Joe is a little John. Rather, the universal self is John and is also Joe. You are both them at the same time, but separately in a sense.

When we think that what we fundamentally are, what our true identity is, is this particular body and personality, we make a mistake. If that's what you think you are, then of course that could not have been anyone else. But that's not what you, the one experiencing this, really are. You are all of it and also beyond all of it, "it" being the stuff in the world.

This isn't solipsism. In solipsism, it is as if one individual human perspective is the only real one and everything that is an object for that mind is merely that, with no other people actually having their own subjectivity. No, this view I am talking about involves there being subjectivity everywhere, but with all this subjectivity actually being one, there really being only one subject, one that is everywhere. But it isn't that it is spread over space. At the level of the subject, location simply doesn't make any sense.

Location only shows up as a feature of the contents of experience. It is part of how experience is structured. It doesn't apply to the experiencer itself.

The reason we fail to see that we are experiencing everything is that information isn't integrated in such a way that we can know that we are seeing through the eyes of both John and Joe at the same time. Joe's brain contains no memories of being John. And John's brain contains no memories of being Joe. It is a little like an amnesiac who can move between several rooms, but who only has a chalkboard in each room to record and remember experiences he has in that room only. He lacks a way of moving information from one room to another to integrate it all and realize that he occupies multiple rooms. While in room A, he has no memories of ever having been in room B.

Information works according to the laws of physics and is local. There are differences and distinctions. One "person", one body in the world, is distinguished from another. Basically what makes it up is a collection of such distinctions. It is all the ways in which it is different. Information, in Bateson's words, is "a difference that makes a difference". Matter is information. Form is information. What is experienced is information. But the experiencer is not information. The experiencer is never an object. Information and the laws that govern it belong to the contents of experience. The subject itself has no differences and is not a content of experience. A rock can be "this, but not that" or "here, not there", but such distinctions do not apply to the ground-level "I".

I suppose that it might make sense to say that when we think, "I am (insert your name)," we are not wholly incorrect. It is the exclusivity of that identification that is mistaken.

1. As long as there is a a shortage of PPE, the public cannot trust advice about PPE for the general public. — unenlightened

This is exactly on the mark. There is an incentive to disinform. From their standpoint, if they tell people that masks work, then everyone goes out and buys up all the masks and none remain for medical professionals. So they tell people that masks don't work very well. And yet, notice that masks, even surgical masks, are considered by the same people to be SO, SO important for medical professionals! If they didn't work, why are they trying to protect the supply for medical professionals? If we had an adequate supply of masks to go around with no worry of a shortage, the official advice would be different, you can be sure! But partly, they also consider the general public to be stupid and to be incapable of using a mask properly.

If used properly, masks help to some degree. It's obvious.

Yes, surgical masks don't seal very well. But they catch droplets when talking, coughing, sneezing, and so on, reducing your chances of giving something to others. They probably aren't super-effective for reducing your chances of catching something though, as lots of air comes in around the sides unfiltered. And even the filter isn't so great. Better than nothing though! If it reduces your chances by 20%, that is significant.

But better masks, like N95s, are actually quite effective. If everyone had access to those and we were all wearing them properly when in public spaces, our situation would likely be very different.

Luck has nothing to do with it.

The intuition that you could have been anything is evidence that you don't have an understanding of evolution by natural selection. — Harry Hindu

The question isn't about why this body has the form that it has, or how humans originated, how this particular human originated, or any such thing. Our question isn't pointed at the objective situation. The question regards puzzles of personal, subjective identity. Why am I seeing the world from this perspective and not another? Suppose that there are only three objects in the world, three spheres, A, B, and C. Objectively, all we can say is that there are these three spheres, and they are in such and such an arrangement. Questions like the one this thread deals with don't even yet arise as long as this world is described only in objective terms. We can ask questions about how the spheres came to be arranged the way they are. (And questions about how humans came to be, how they came to have their shape, and so on, which evolution by natural selection likely explains, are questions about how the world is objectively arranged.) But that has nothing to do with the question at hand. Where our question enters is when we find that we are one of the spheres. As a subject, we occupy some point-of-view in the world. If you find yourself as sphere A, you might wonder why you are occupying that position in the world rather than finding yourself as B or C. Why are you A and not B or C? In my post, I offer a possible answer to this sort of question.

I was gripped by your question some years ago until I realized something that I think solves a whole host of philosophical problems in one fell swoop. This question is indeed a good one and can lead to interesting things. I like the way it is formulated here:

From Mind and Materialism, by Geoffrey Madell; Edinburgh University Press, 1988. 151 pgs., page 103

V. Indexicality

It has been clearly recognised by some that the fact of indexical
thought presents a special problem for physicalism. This problem is
most clearly seen in relation to the first person. Thomas Nagel put his
finger on it in his paper 'Physicalism'. 1 Let us envisage the most
complete objective description of the world and everyone in it which
it is possible to have, couched in the objective terminology of the
physical sciences. However complete we make this description,
'there remains one thing I cannot say in this fashion -- namely, which
of the various persons in the world I am'. No amount of information
non-indexically expressed can be equivalent to the first person asser-
tion, 'I am G.M.'. How can one accommodate the existence of the
first-person perspective in a wholly material world? A complete objec-
tive description of a particular person is one thing; the assertion,
'The person thus described is me' is something in addition, and
conveys more information. But this extra information isn't of a
character which physical science could recognise. If reality com-
prises assemblies of physical entities only, it appears utterly mysteri-
ous that some arbitrary element of that objective order should be me.

But this doesn't really address the question of why you find yourself being the particular person you are rather than someone else.

I used to ask what the odds are that I would find myself being a human. I had an intuition that I could have been anything. And there is so much more that is lifeless! How did I get so lucky?

Many people would say that you are your brain, that you literally are identical with your brain. This doesn't seem so problematic until you start to think about it. It isn't the identity with the brain itself that is problematic, in my view, but rather the extent of what "you" are. It is the problem of indexical extent. When people say you are your brain, what they are really saying needs to be clarified. They are saying that you literally are identical with this particular finite collection of particles and no more and no less. That's what "your brain" is. And if you are identical with your brain, that's what they are saying.

If what these people say is true, then I literally am a three pound hunk of matter. And I am only this three pound hunk of matter. This is really strange! Why so little? Why so much? Why this particular collection of particles? Why am I not just one quark? Clearly, my identity spans multiple things. How? My identity seems restricted but extensive. I don't find myself being a whole population of people. What I am seems bounded somehow, as if there is a line drawn around this brain that designates it, and no more and no less, as belonging to me, whatever that is.

Think now about the fact that these particles that compose your brain were once scattered all over, maybe a few particles in a carrot somewhere, some others in a rock, some others in a cloud, and so on. Were you these same particles then? Absurd, isn't it? What are the odds that your particles would just happen to come together in a brain like that?

Consider that objectively, this boundary around what you seem to be does not exist. There are no magical membranes. Out in the world itself, there is no clear separation of a person from their environment. There is nothing special about the matter composing a brain.

Let's return for a moment to the idea that you are lucky to find yourself being a human. While thinking about this, try to keep in mind that it is important whether you consider it from a first-person perspective or a third-person perspective. Objectively, it is silly to suggest that a certain banana is lucky to find itself being that banana, right?! Of course! But subjectively, matters seem different. The first-person perspective is what presents the puzzle. If you abandon it and try to solve the problem from the objective, third-person by declaring, "Of course this banana is this banana!", you miss the point!

Think about the odds of winning a lottery. Suppose that we are to randomly select one person out of seven billion to win a trillion dollars. It is assured that one person will win. When the winner has been determined, objectively, it is not at all surprising that someone won. That was always assured. And if you are not among these people and are just seeing it all strictly objectively, no matter who wins, there is nothing surprising. But if instead, you are one of these people and you find that you are the winner, you will naturally be surprised! You certainly should not have expected to find yourself the winner!

The situation with our identity as humans seems somehow similar to the lottery. Objectively, it isn't surprising that these creatures should be identical with themselves and should declare that they are themselves. Nothing puzzling at all. But if you find yourself occupying such a perspective, it seems different. There is the sense that you could be seeing the world from the perspective of anything. And if you were to draw one three-pound collection of particles out of a hat, the odds are overwhelming that you would end up with some lifeless material. Isn't it a bit surprising that you should find yourself in such a privileged position? Even if you can only find yourself being something alive, humans are vastly outnumbered by other possibilities. Why are you a human and not a mouse?

Let's get to what I think is the solution to all of this. That you are yourself is not the problem. The problem is the belief that your identity is restricted, period. Drop the boundary. That's it. You are everything. You occupy all perspectives. There is only one. The world is itself. That's it. There are no demarcation lines separating this from that. There are no true individuals, no separate objects. The first-person perspective finds itself everywhere simultaneously, and likely at all times as well. The world is everywhere present to itself.

There is only one thing to explain, and that is why our identity seems limited, why we aren't aware of being everything all at once. The answer to that lies in how information gets integrated. That which finds itself being me is the very same one as that which finds itself being you. But from over here, I don't know anything about being you because your memories are not in this brain. It's that simple. It is a question of access to information.

Consider an amnesiac named Bob who uses a chalkboard in a room as a substitute for his lacking memory. If we show him something, he records his observations on the chalkboard. If we ask him a question about what he has observed, he consults the chalkboard. Suppose we move him to another room with another chalkboard. He doesn't know he has been moved! If we ask him about what we showed him in the other room, he consults the chalkboard in this room and finds nothing. He has no way of integrating information between the two rooms. He might integrate information between them if he has a mechanism for this, such as a notebook, a way of carrying information back and forth.

This is analogous to what happens in experiments with split-brain patients, where it seems that by cutting the corpus callosum, we have turned one person into two, where it can be demonstrated that what is observed from only one hemisphere cannot be reported by the other.

If we show that in room B, Bob cannot report observations made in room A, we have not thereby demonstrated that Bob in room A and Bob in room B are two different subjects. The situation with you and me is similar. From my brain (think room with chalkboard), I cannot report your memories. And there is the illusion that who I am is restricted to the information I have access to.

Notice an interesting asymmetry with respect to time. You can remember the past, but not the future. When you look back, you feel identical with that past self because you remember those experiences. You have access. Not so with the future. Your future self is hypothetical and isn't really included in your sense of self. But once that future has arrived, you will feel that you are both that person and this now-past person.

In reality, your relation to your future self is not much different than your relation to me. It is a question of access.

The analogy of Bob in the rooms fails in a very important sense. Bob is someone who is separable from the rooms and moves between them. We are not similarly separable. It isn't that there is one little homunculus that runs around and occupies all the perspectives. No. There is nothing separable. There is just the whole world being identical with itself. There is one 'I', and it is everything. There is nothing from which it can be separated.

Your body is experienced simultaneously by this one from the perspectives of all that interacts with it. You as 'other' and you as 'my body' are just what that particular body is like from two different angles. Both angles are experienced by the one subject simultaneously. But the information from the two perspectives is not integrated in such a way that there is a structure of experience that involves knowing that you are both at the same time.

So why do you find yourself being you, that particular human? It because you find yourself being everything. If one person is sure to hold the winning lottery ticket, and you are all of the people, you should expect to find yourself the winner, as well as all those who didn't win.

I think that people should rethink all anthropic principle stuff in light of this way of looking at things.

Also, if you think I am crazy, just some guy on the Internet, consider that many important thinkers have held a very similar view, Erwin Schrodinger and Arthur Schopenhauer among them. Also, Daniel Kolak, a living philosopher, has written an interesting book called I am You:

link

The thought occurs to me that there is a discernible difference between the two spheres that is to be found in the relative difference in location. Each is different from the other precisely in the fact that it is on the opposite side of the symmetry plane. For each one, the other is different from it in being "over there" rather than "here". For each one, the other is to be found outside of itself. For each one, the addition of the other makes two. This is a "difference that makes a difference", to use Bateson's phrase regarding information.

If we had some sort of absolute space with a coordinate system, we could say that the two spheres are at different locations in this space. If we draw two circles on a sheet of paper on opposite sides of a line of symmetry, we can say that each occupies a different position on the sheet. But if there is nothing analogous to that sheet in the two-sphere universe, no background relative to which the spheres can be said to be located, it would seemingly present a problem of finding a difference in locations. Not so. A relative difference is still a difference. Each sphere stands a certain distance away from the other. For each sphere, the other sphere stands at such and such a distance away, while this one does not.

Instead of thinking about a possible difference between the two spheres, we could think about the difference between there being only one sphere and there being two spheres separated by some distance. These two situations are different, no? Perhaps by comparing the two situations, we can see what is the same and what is different, and by focusing on the difference, we may discover just what it is that makes each sphere different from the other. It seems that something is revealed by considering the universe as a whole rather than just comparing the spheres within it.

First, in a one-sphere universe, there is no gap between spheres. So that separation, that distance, is something extra in the two-sphere universe. Each is far from the other. For each one, it isn't just that there is another sphere, but also that this other sphere is some distance away. So comparing the two, the first sphere is just a sphere, while the second sphere is sphere with the addition of its distance. For each sphere, the other sphere isn't just a sphere. What it is for it to be what it is is for it to be some distance away. Its "awayness" could perhaps be seen as a property it has that makes it different.

This is an interesting feature of relativistic situations. There are situations even in our universe where it is thought that things might exist from some frames of reference and not from others.

Second, there are twice as many spheres. Having a second one presents a difference, namely, that now there are two.

One possible objection though to concluding that the two spheres are therefore different is that the plane of symmetry could actually be a reflecting plane. It might be that there is only one sphere and the reflecting plane whereby there appears to be another sphere. In that case, there really is no difference between the two spheres. Their relative separation is an illusion caused by the reflecting plane. The sphere can then be seen as related to the reflecting plane or maybe even related to itself by means of that plane, but not related to another sphere.

But Black's proposed situation of there being two identical spheres on opposite sides of a plane of symmetry, and not a reflecting plane, literally defines the situation from the beginning as a case of there definitely being two distinct spheres. We start with this knowledge about this universe. This being the case, we are given to know that each one is not identical with the other, as they are numerically distinct. So an illusion of two spheres is ruled out.

It might be best to regard the identity of indiscernibles as a principle that guides us in deciding what is the case when we are in a state of ignorance. Suppose that we are given a scenario in which there appear to be two spheres, but we don't know if there really are two. And we then use the principle of the identity of indiscernibles to try to decide. So we ask, are the two spheres different in any discernible way? If so, they are not identical. If not, there is only one sphere. But here, with this epistemological situation, we have no absolute knowledge. All differences amount to what is discernible from some vantage point. We are looking at this universe from some perspective. It is a matter of information. Where is this knower in relation to the spheres? For this knower, is one sphere further away than the other? If all that exists are the two spheres, then the knower can't be a third thing. If you are one of the spheres, if you then compare the two spheres, one is indeed at a greater distance. The two are then discernible.

Notice that for you, a knower, in order to be in a situation where one sphere is not at a greater remove, you must be separated from both spheres. You must be outside the universe, with some kind of absolute view. Or you could be at the center of this universe, perhaps with no discernible left and right sides yourself by which you can say that one sphere is on your right and the other on your left, or in front or behind or above or below. Both spheres are the same distance away. They are both the same, seemingly in every respect, no? Where then are you presented with the appearance of two spheres? It would seem that absent some means of differentiating, which, if present, would clearly distinguish the two spheres, you would be presented with only one impression, that of a sphere at some distance from you, and that's all.

I suggest that in any case where you imagine a situation of two spheres in relation to some observer, some difference between them will be revealed. For example, one sphere is in one direction, the other in another direction. But what has given you this impression of direction? Some kind of asymmetry in you must be present. We imagine looking one way and then the other, now seeing one, then seeing the other, perhaps by turning your head. A person with a turned head has a distinct left and right, which gives a means of discerning the spheres, as they can be seen as different with respect to these distinct sides of yourself.

Can you imagine a situation in which you, as an observer, could be receiving identical information from two different spheres at the same time and in which you definitely have an impression of there being two spheres? Suppose you are a head with two faces, each one facing a sphere. You are symmetrical with respect to the plane of symmetry. Each face sees a sphere in the same way, the same information arriving. Would you really have a sense of two spheres? By what means would you gain this impression? Could you actually tell the difference between a universe in which there is a two-faced head, each face seeing a different sphere, and a universe in which there is just a half-head with one face seeing a single sphere?

In order to tell the difference between two things, to have information about a difference, you must be able to compare. To know that a change has happened, for example, you must be able compare one state to another. You must be able to integrate information between the two. In the case of temporal differences, you must have memory. And this memory itself is an asymmetry in you between the two moments. In the later moment, you have more memories, more information.

If the two-faced head is to have some way of integrating the information arriving at both sets of eyes so as to yield an impression of two spheres on opposite sides of the universe, there must be a way to compare the two. And for there to be a way to compare the two, there must be a difference, an asymmetry, perhaps a difference in the brain in that head.

Suppose there is a brain in that head that is also symmetrical, and the neurons in the brain on one side of the symmetry plane are talking to the neurons on the other side. The neurons on one side send a message, saying, "I see a sphere, how about you?" These neurons also receive an identical message from the other side at the same time. Each side then concludes that yes, I see a sphere from my side and the other side also sees a sphere. But notice what's happening now. We again have a perspectival asymmetry. We are not looking at the universe from a perspective that is equidistant from the two spheres. We are looking at it from from the POV of neurons on one side, which are more distant from one sphere than the other. This is akin to being one of the spheres and regarding the other sphere, one being distant and one being close.

If what we are instead includes both halves of the brain on both sides of the symmetry plane at the same time and the symmetry is unbroken in every respect, it is hard to see how, from this point of view, we could have an impression of two spheres, or two separate impressions of one sphere. There is no way to compare, and thereby to separate, the two impressions. In order to do so, there would have to be some difference, however slight, by which we can say that brain-half A is telling me about seeing a sphere and brain-half B is also telling me about seeing a sphere. How do I have the impression of brain-halves A and B? How do I compare them and find a difference such that I am justified in concluding that I have received information from two distinct brain-halves? There must be a difference, a distinct signature from each half. It is the same problem as with the spheres.


I think that there is no conceivable situation in which an observer of any kind could have an impression of such a symmetric universe. All impressions of there being two spheres require some sort of asymmetry, either a discernible difference in the two sides of the universe, or a perspective on this universe that is asymmetric with respect to it, such that one side is more distant than the other.

If I am equidistant from the two sides, and I am also symmetric with respect to the plane of symmetry, it is impossible for me to have an impression of two distinct sides.

In imagining this situation, we are cheating by allowing ourselves this absolute perspective (non-perspective, or view from nowhere?) from outside the universe. And we are also at the same time, in our mental picture, smuggling in ways of perceiving that involve a body with asymmetries that has a location relative to the spheres. We imagine standing at some distance from the two spheres, such that one is somewhat to the left and the other is somewhat to the right. We, in our bodily experience of our world, often have just such an impression of something over to the left and something else over to the right. But here, we in fact have an asymmetric body with two distinct sides by which to compare. Our world that includes this "left-rightness" is not bisected by a symmetry plane. If it were, there would be no such left-right impression.

How do we get an impression of two spheres? You might say that we can see the gap between them. I then ask, how? How do we know there is a gap? We see the gap by seeing each sphere and comparing the two impressions and seeing that they are different in such and such a way, namely, that this sphere is on my left and that one is on my right and I am seeing them both at the same time but in different parts of my visual field. This requires a lot of information integration involving discernible asymmetries.

There likely is no absolute knowledge or objectivity of the sort that Black's proposed scenario seems to imply, where you, whatever you are, are just given to know, somehow, that there are two spheres on opposite sides of a symmetry plane.

Our real situation is perspectival, epistemological, and informational, and you can't know anything without being part of the system in question and interacting with the things in question. And here, to know distinctness, there must be a "difference that makes a difference".

Black's imagined situation is impossible. To just propose a universe in which there are two distinct spheres with all their properties in common on opposite sides of a symmetry plane might be comparable to just proposing a universe in which the rules of mathematics are called into question by there being a case of 2+2 equaling 5.

Saying that there are two things which are exactly the same in every way (having all their properties in common) while also saying that these identical things are yet being distinct is sort of like saying that there are two things which are in no way distinct, and yet are distinct. What it means to be distinct is having a difference in properties. So to say that there are two distinct spheres with all their properties in common is maybe the same as saying that there are two distinct spheres that are not distinct. A is both X and not-X at the same time. Black is here perhaps violating the law of non-contradiction. And along with this, he is invoking an absolute, objective perspective, which is arguably impossible, also implying a perfect symmetry in the knowledge or perceptual situation, while at the same time smuggling in intuitions and evoking mental pictures that only arise in an embodied, perceptually asymmetric situation, such as a human looking out at two spheres. He is asking us to bring up a mental picture that is impossible without asymmetries while telling us that this is symmetrical.

How about the value of truth, even if it is dark? Often, our happiness and pleasure depend on believing lies. But some choose to see the truth, even if it might invalidate their very lives. I suppose you could argue that they get some sort of pleasure from the idea that they are faithful to the truth, but I think it would be a stretch.



Consider that we tend to believe that there are higher and lower pleasures. The pleasure of eating a donut or masturbating is certainly lower than that of being there for someone in distress, creating a work of art, struggling to understand a profound mathematical theorem, overcoming an addiction, curing cancer, or some such. Here lies a clue. What all these have in common is pleasure, yes, but pay attention to the vertical dimension that makes some pleasures higher than others. There is your non-hedonic value.

It isn't that it is pleasurable that makes a higher pleasure more valuable than a lower one, since all of these pleasures are pleasurable, but rather something else, something hard to define. We are dealing with a second dimension.

The sort of value I am talking about seems actually independent of pleasure. In fact, it seems to often justify pain.

But we get some sort of satisfaction out of it, you say! Well, why? Isn't that very satisfaction a mere consequence of the fact that we appreciate the actual non-hedonic value in it? The pleasure here results from the fact that we love the good. When the good is increased, it makes us happy. But it isn't the resulting happiness that makes the good good. Rather, it is the goodness itself that makes us glad. We are gladdened precisely because we perceive the value, not the ither way around. The goodness is prior. The fact that goodness is associated with pleasure does not mean that goodness is identical with pleasure or a result of it.

"But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic." — Zeus

I've seen plenty of examples of this in my lifetime! Always in other people of course! :joke:

That's interesting. The pillar image is creepy!

it's not even a bad way to go! — Gregory

Seriously? Weeks of suffering leading to death? Suppose we were to execute people that way, with weeks of suffering on the way to death. Would that fly?

You clearly don't have any loved ones who are seriously at risk of dying from this thing.

In a dream lastnight, death walked into the room, as I was staring to see him, the lights were extinguished. In the total darkness I felt helpless and woke up with a fright. — Punshhh

A week ago, I had a dream that might have featured a similar figure. I saw an empty building complex at night, vaguely resembling my old high school. Behind it, looming large and looking over the complex at me, was a humanoid figure whose presence was negative. He was like a black hole in space with a humanoid shape. There was a sense of gravity, like he was sucking everything in. The sillhouette of his head seen straight on resembled a pair of hands splayed out like wings. His face was like a howling abyss into which it seemed I could fall. He wordlessly communicated a sense of "I am here. I am coming." There was an apocalyptic feeling about the dream. Other ominous dreams followed that night.

Was that death? I don't know, but it was certainly disturbing!

Less than we thought. — frank

How about a rough guess? Give me a number.

Are you saying that since the number of known cases in US now is 4,500 and deaths 88, that if we multiply the knowns by 5 to 10 and divide 88 by that, that the real death rate is likely between 0.2% and 0.4%?

Does the mentioned Chinese data gathered after testing became widespread support such a conclusion?

From the data we have, mortality rate is about 3%, and that consisting mostly of elderly, no? Yes, it is bad but it is not the end of the world. — Nobeernolife

3% is higher than the original estimate of 2%.



I suspect that this thing is eventually going to kill members of my family. Many are older and are smokers and otherwise unhealthy. I'll likely live, as I am relatively healthy, but much pain is coming. End of the world? No. But possibly devastating to me personally.

This disease is no where near as lethal as it originally appeared to be. — frank

Based on your reading of the article, how lethal do you think it is?

Sad! I love the guy! In his devotion to the high ideals, he makes me want to be a conservative! Quite unlike the sheer ugliness of much of contemporary American "conservatism" (that goes for a lot of "progressivism" as well)!

When I saw the news, I looked him up on YouTube and came across this, which I had forgotten about:

https://youtu.be/bHw4MMEnmpc

Very much worth watching! He tempts me to believe once more that life has value, that there is something worth reaching for! I agree to a large extent with what he presents in that film.

I've read his short intro to Kant and The Soul of the World. Both are worth reading.

He turned me onto this, which is one of the most moving pieces of music I have ever heard (possibly not its greatest performance of all time, but good enough for me!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBeXF_lnj_M

RIP, Sir Roger Scruton!

Discover a new source of energy so efficient people can't ignore it? — khaled

I've often wondered if a miracle cheap source of clean energy wouldn't actually make matters even worse! Energy is the means by which we turn the planet's resources into consumer products. Imagine if we were to suddenly gain access to unlimited free energy! Of course, then we'd also be able to sequester carbon, rearrange the galaxy, and so on...

I think that some of the most insightful stuff I have ever read related to this topic was in Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. Very interesting. And I am not usually a fan of psychology.

What can this world-beyond-all-carving be if not a kind of internal suspicion within our systematic carving-up of the world? — Eee

Good point!

The map is not the territory could be interpreted to mean only that we expect our map to change. Our map appears on itself as a changeable entity? And the world-beyond-the-map is the world-to-come is our map's knowledge of its own fragility? — Eee

Yes, what you bring to mind here for me is that we, at the level of our human apprehension of things at least, are stuck with a map. We'll never know the territory directly. Our map can change to a degree, and it will. But it can never be altogether dissolved while leaving us intact. Its fragility is ours. But ultimately, what is is what is being humanity, and in its simple being-in-itself, it is beyond maps. And that level of things is unavoidably present even for us, insofar as we are inseparable from reality. While we stand here looking at our map, with its boundaries and labels, the situation of there being people looking at maps itself is the territory! But how to look at that without mobilizing a map of it?

I suppose that at the level of being, we are always directly in contact with, or rather are, the territory, while at the level of cognizing, we are always looking at a map. This could be tied to Zen meditation, where the injunction often amounts to something like, "Just be!" The comedy here is that you can't not do that! So it is silly to command it! But it seems to try to bring attention to the territory. Stop thinking! Things seen through the mind are at a remove and are representations. But to see the immediate situation of there being a mind making its representations is another matter! Watching through the mind and watching the mind are different! But one must be careful not to watch the mind through the mind!

Perhaps the way to avoid that is to just be! This seems to amount to sort of stepping back, returning to yourself, as if we are normally pressing out of ourselves and out of the world in order to turn around and look at ourselves, in which case, we encounter a surface through a membrane and are unable to directly touch what is being regarded. But if we only relax back into ourselves, we find the world in-itself. We never lost it! Internally, in our being, the territory is always already present. Externally, in our grasping, we lose it.