Suppose you have two oranges on the table. From your human, practical, primate perspective it makes sense to say that there are two oranges; your stomach has a limited capacity, and you may want to share the oranges with other primates; so you focus on the bits of information that are very relevant for your behaviour when fruit is concerned. A cockroach will only see a lot more orange that she can chew, perhaps too little rotten for her taste.

However, these perspectives (that are made of bearing in mind certain bits of information and becoming oblivious to everything else) are not reality. When a human being needs to make sense of the universe beyond oranges, he needs to take into consideration more relationships in the phenomenal world, and that implies a more complex analysis that the one required to count pieces of food, which is something by the way that even bees do.

If you say that there are two oranges on the table, you are actually saying: there are two oranges, and there is the relationship between them and the combined effect of the two as a system: the sum of their gravitational force; the increased probability that a fruit fly finds them (as the combined aroma is a stronger signal), the ideas in your mind about oranges; the perturbation of the electromagnetic field; and so on. All of these factors would be different or disappear if the oranges are put in different locations of the universe. So the location of the two oranges on the table at the same time, that is: the relationship between the two items, is also real, and physical, and an element to take into consideration. Therefore, you have two oranges, plus the relationship of the oranges between them and their environment. It so happens that what makes oranges oranges and not stones, are also relationships; so the difference between two oranges and two oranges and their effect on the world is just the number of relationships, or operations in the physical world that you are willing to consider.

As this always happens with any number of items, we can deduce that it´s never 2 + 2=4, but 2+2 equal 4 plus the effects derived from existing 2 oranges on the table and not any other number.

So when we say that if I eat three chocolate bars there is one left, what we do is: to consider only the levels of reality more meaningful for us (not the atomic level, where there are no chocolate bars; not the astronomic level where only massive celestial bodies are in sight); and you are actively ignoring all that is has to do with eating three chocolate bars and being one left. Which might not be much, or it might be a sick stomach; but in any case it´s never equal to zero. It never really is. Say that instead of chocolate bars, we are talking gun shots directed to you from a pistol which still has one bullet in its barrel.

You may say that all those effects are trivial, but they are not, because we live in a world in which the flight of a butterfly can cause major changes given enough time. That is, a universe where everything is connected. When we teach that two plus two equals four for real, we are encouraging people to be oblivious to many connections that are relevant for our problems. We teach the young to encapsulate their thinking process in disconnected boxes, and to lose the capacity to take into account factors that might change how we understand a problem entirely. We are not supposed to do that; we are not bees or chickens counting flowers or grains. We are animals that build whole worlds in our minds, to see many more connections through holistic images of the natural (and psychic) realities; even if we focus on one or two at a time when engaged in a practical action.

I´m the fool who argues fact. For me, 2+2 equal 4 is no more than a mathematical construct. It´s not a realistic, scientific way of approaching plurality in the real world; but we use it because it is convenient for accountancy, selling and buying, building machines and houses. However, someone at some point in our education should warn us that two plus two equals four does not describe reality existing outside our minds. It bothers me that everybody assumes that algorithm as something very real, even self-evident. It clearly is not, it is only evident when I´m counting money or doing similar abstract operations; but not when I look at nature.

But matter is a thing, matter is when energy is organized into atoms. We don´t know what energy truly is, but whatever it is, it can solidify into atoms and those atoms behave with certain rules. Matter matters!

what good has the Trinity for Christians? When I was a believer we prayed to God in the figure of God the Father, or sometimes Jesus, also the Virgin Mary which is so dear for Mediterranean people; or to those already dead that were supposed to have a better and more reliable signal to communicate with God wherever they were now. We never prayed to the Holy Ghost, poor thing! And we never dedicated a single minute to make sense of the Trinity in our meetings, readings or retreats in the mountains. I miss then why the Trinity problem is relevant for people that are not studying to become a priest and need to pass tests on Scholastic philosophy or the Fathers of the Church. What´s the big deal? Is it important in some Christian confessions? I know that it was important for Isaac Newton, almost as much as finding the true location of Atlantis hidden in the Torah.

I have a very particular situation to offer. I retired at 35, against my will and many tears and legal threats from my headmaster if I did not go to the doctor and asked for a sick leave. Two years later I was retired permanently. Since the hard time at my school, that gave me post-trauma syndrome and will not talk further about it, I have not worked, and only dedicated myself to otium as Ancient Romans called it: creative activities that are not paid, as opposed to nec otium, or negocio (business). I have found these activities a must to keep myself sane and in peace. So it is true that you still need to work and feel useful to others when you don´t need the money. This does not mean, however, that whatever makes you feel good or useful is ethical.

How would you define with exactitude and clarity what ethical work is? What should we teach the young generation as praise-worthy labour?

not exactly. Let me explain: Charity addresses a very wide spectrum of social needs, from emergency situations in which you need fire-fighters and clean water, to national strategies to improve a whole society. I know from inside the part of the spectrum helping urgent needs to community projects. Community projects in Manos Unidas, were projects people from the world would apply for. For example, say a mission in Perú wants a new school. These projects were examined and selected according to a chart of criteria to be met; from ecological sustainability, to economic efficiency or hiring local people, and many others. Among the projects selected, our local group would choose one in particular, based on our group criteria that were just the Manos Unidas national criteria put into simpler words. The willingness of the director of the project to come to visit us in Spain to give us feed-back counted a lot too. We´d raise money for this project but the money itself did not go directly to the project, but to a fund where all projects got their funding; the local commitment in Spain was important never the less.

The criteria to select the projects is very important. If people in a country know that they have to meet certain criteria of sustainability, good management, maximum commitment of local communities and so on, you are shaping how things are done and supporting people who want to do things right but are facing enormous cultural and political difficulties. For instance, say that a new school wants to teach sexual education to girls, and the imam says no; if the money for the school (that is rarely just a school, it is usually many more things in a small village) is conditional on the implementation of a sexual health program, the headmaster can bring people on his side over the imam or priest.

When progressives state that this strategy is equal to unfairly "impose" civilization on supposedly pristine cultures, they simply do not know what they are talking about. They are siding with the elements in a community that want nothing to change, especially the status quo.
For example, the U.K. gives a lot of aid money to Tanzania for birth control programs; but the government, which is pro-natality and literally ask Tanzanian women to have as many babies as they can, have been giving the millions to Jihadist groups: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6172115/Britain-funds-45million-family-planning-programme-Tanzania.html

This is what happens when you give without real compromises, criteria, supervision, "imposing civilization" on the project you fund. You feel good, but the money is actually helping those who oppose the betterment of a society against those who are struggling for a change.

I quitted Manos Unidas when the Spanish Church wanted some of the money of the project to go to build churches; but I learnt a lot about how charity is done right and professionally even if I was only a volunteer. The bottom line for me is that ethical behaviour only happens when decisions include rational thought and knowledge.

I don´t think helping people is ever a good idea. Helping is to make the giver feel good, and the donor and society think that is that feeling and the attitude that count. Bullshit! it´s outcome that matter. When you help you try to impose your idea of how the world should be on others. To do it when people are in need and weakened is very useful for your selfish purpose, but it is not fair to others. What religious groups do in disasters and wars and hospitals is unethical. It´s what ISIS does to recruit people, to help those in need and taking advantage of the situation to forward an agenda.

Better than helping is colaborating. Colaboration is based on a more symmetrical relationship, and there is no favour involved or poisoned gift; only equals working for common goals, and services that can be returned. Personally, I only help people who can return the favour, and only give gifts with permission and recognizing explicitly that it´s mostly me who´s being helped when someone accepts my present. I only colaborate with people that I care about, people who are in direct contact with me and are part of my circle. I would never help citizens from other nations or people I´ve never been with. Not even Jesus did that; love thy neighbour, the people around you; this was a good advice, because people around you can return the help, and it´s easier to know if you are helping or doing harm.
Of course, digital technologies mean that "your neighbour" might sometimes be thousands of kilometres away; but that´s okay if the relationship with them is personal, real and reciprocal.

You may think I´m Mr Scrooge, but actually I´ve been a volunteer in the past with Cáritas, Manos Unidas, green groups, and helped people I did not even know. I´ve also been on the receiving end of charity when I was in dire straits. But precisely those experiences taught me that there was a much more ethical and healthy way to act in the world.

I would like to recommend you a bodhran. A bodhran is an Irish drum you play to help folk musicians keep the rhythm, and it can also be played alone. I bought one and it is really easy and the sound is pleasant. I can already do Caroline´s bodhran in "Toss the feathers"! which means it is really easy to learn in comparison with other instruments.

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

How is the Real Madrid-Atlético de Madrid game the very same game in my smartphone, my tv set (which is very large) and my sister´s tablet in her apartment? It doesn´t make any sense.

These divine divisions -like all partitions of reality- are only in our mind but they are handy. The Triad division in particular, implies Perfection and Creative Energy; it´s very suitable to symbolize the Origin and Continuity of the Cosmos, as you can also see in the hindu Trimurti. The personal aspect refers to a historical role of the divinity in human affairs, just like personal traits in all of us are made of a set of relationships in historic time with the social and natural world.

duckduckgo.com tells me that it is a frequent quote by Paul C. Nutt, from the Ohio University, who writes books about making decisions. I wonder if he thinks that he should not have written half of these books

all countries, when are in trouble, suffer foreign interference. The whole purpose of defending borders and keeping a national state is to prevent it; but the moment this fails, foreign powers and invaders do their thing. However, this is no reason to think that a society is hopeless and in the hands of aliens. There are many nations that managed to shake off that interference by getting citizens working together under a common project. So many examples: Modern Israel, Spain in the XV century, the 13 American colonies, India in the XXth century (and other periods), etc. Afghanistan needs such common vision. I propose a post-islamic, civilized (not religious, not tribal) vision for all Afghans. Invent a new national meta-narrative and sell it to the people.

"However, it seems that those who agree with Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria use this statement as a way to diminish any argument that doesn't support his position." I don´t think that is the case. I find more plausible that supporters of the decision aren´t complaining about the opposition to the measure, which is totally democratic and reasonable as different citizens have different standpoints or should. What they are upset about, I suspect, is the fact that opposition is so loaded with anger and outrage; not mere voiced disagreement, but wrath and emotions, emotions, emotions out of control.

I do not have a position on the Syria issue, which I admit is rather beyond my comprehension. But I do sympathise with Trump´s foreign policy supporters, when all they get is a screenshot from The planet of the Apes day after day after day. It must be annoying. If there is a better way to deal with Syria, is lost in the yelling like tears in the rain.

If you get this kind of response whatever Trump says, does or refrains from doing, it is understandable that you complain that there is no alternative proposals or rational critics to dialogue with. Just yelling and hurt feelings and banners that can be re-used a hundred times. And Democrat leaders are just yelling with words; repeating slogans and showing angry faces. Annoying:

http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/161111191123-18-trump-protest-super-tease.jpg

We do Christmas wrong. The sad, nostalgic time is meant to be All Saints´ Day, and Halloween; and similar festivals in other religions except islam (as islam is a personality cult and doesn´t follow the rhythms of Nature in its holidays).

Christmas, or the winter solstice festival, is meant to be beyond that point of tears for the dead, memorials, and balance of the year (which belong to the end of the harvest time). The end of december however, is a turning point in that process, because the sun rises again and days grow longer; it´s a time to regain joy and to share hopes that cold, darkness and (in the past) scarcity of food, will pass and the first signs of rebirth are starting to show.

So Christmas should be more like Yule or Saturnalia, a very vitalistic carnival where the centre of the action is not at home but outside in the open. The sad Christmas culture is at odd with both the natural cycles and the Christian metanarrative; a Child is born, not mourned.

This change of paradigm would help people with suicidal tendencies no doubt, because they could rely on Christmas to cope with long winter nights, instead of this frightening visit of ghosts of past, present and future Christmas to lonely people for many nights. Many times you do wrong by trying to do good; and Charles Dickens did a lot more wrong than good with his damned Christmas Carol. I say: Deck the halls with boughs of holly. Have fun, have sex, don´t go near a church at midnight as they are too close to graveyards, and celebrate Nativity of a new cycle instead of the death of this year.

It´s not self- consciousness I was referring to, but about being part of something greater. Let me try to explain it better: a bee, a dinosaur and Sarah Silverman are all part of one project, we can call it "Life Project", that for the sake of simplicity we are going to suppose it started with the formation of our Sun. A bee is very little self-aware, that´s how she copes with being a bee; however, she´s unknowingly very much integrated and a contributing element of a single process of Unity in Diversity, which is Life as we know it. No machine I know is part of that. They are not concerned with Life, and they even destroy life to make room for more machines and synthetic space. All our machines, they may well be alien parasites from another universe for all they care. They´d behave exactly the same. Giving these machines an ego will not change this at all, as HAL 9000 showed in 2001. They are still aliens from their own universe, totally detached from the common project. We human beings, even as we become more machine-like by the day, are still very much like the bee or or the river or Sarah Silverman. The human way to achieve this in our soul level, is by being meaning-makers; creating worlds of symbols we inhabit as souls but which are responding to, or derived from, the Life project. It is true that we are alienating or separating ourselves from this process, and when we managed to totally switch off, there will be no more humanity left in us. We´ll be like our toaster and unlike the bee.

If a machine could integrate in the cosmos and the life project instead of being just an autonomous process, conscious or not, I guess it can be part of the soul of the universe. But it is far from clear that this is even possible, as machines are by definition, entities that work against the flow of Life.

you can definitely not blame a president for trying to make good on his commitments. Still, you can argue against the convenience of the decision itself; I do not have arguments for or against as I lack the privileged information required. I simply do not know what is better for American foreign policy or the world´s safety. Syria was a Christian country; some of the texts in the New Testament were written there, and it has a great past of civilization, culture, and endless contributions to Humanity. It´s not a Barbaric nation and should never be; it should be reclaimed for civilization, freedom and peace. The strategy to achieve that I do not know.

Happy Christmas! Y feliz Navidad desde España. May you have health, mirth and good company throughout the holidays, as a sign of what is to come in the next year

Nature and Nurture are distinct in the same sense that Yin and Yang in the taijitu symbol are separate: opposite forces within the same active system. Both nature and nurture are made of information, interacting with information. Nature is Yang, and Nurture is Yin. if you push dough through a tool to make spaghetti, the push of the dough is yang and the container with holes it has to go through to make the filaments is yin. Our genetic self is dough, our vital energy is the push, and our environment is the device with the shaping holes.

We can should think of DNA, bodies, personalities as static objects, but as phenomena that happen in time. This approach makes easier to understand how nature and nurture are the same process.

I add this picture for ilustration of the Yin Yang dynamics:

https://i.blogs.es/fff198/marcato/original.jpg

"anti-life" would be viruses" Well not at all MarcRousseau; viruses are very very important for life in all scales. They are as important as bacteria and I´m not sure that life could even happen without them. Consider for example, how the DNA molecule in each of your cells is a former macro-virus that infected ancient unicellular forms.

Nature doesn't have goals, like trusting the environment to complete our designs. You imply that nature has a mind.: I don´t imply anything Harry Hindu, I used a personal language as biologists do to. Because we all know beforhand that nature has no mind (so far as we know); it´s like saying: "these clouds are promising" when you expect them to produce rain.

well yes, sexual identity is determined by biology, but behaviour needs society

when feminists say that sex is a determined by society, they are right; but they aren´t right in assuming that is a bad thing. It is legitimate and necessary that the social milieu plays a part in the design development, or the biological basis is thwarted. So it´s not society VS "true natural self", or society VS whatever-I-want-to-be; the truth is that your inheritance is both genetic and cultural, and you need both to mature healthily. Feminists end up rejecting both natures, because they are crazy.

Nature relies on environment to express phenotypes. In the human species, like in no other species including crows, Nature saved a good deal of pre-set guidelines that is info and occupies space in our DNA, by trusting the environment to complete our designs. The another great advantage, is that in that way the final product will be more adjusted to the actual, ever-changing ecological and social demands of a nomad and socially complex species. The pitfall is that what the snake gets from its blueprints, we need to take from the social womb; if the social womb is sick or poor, we do not mature well. We do not even learn to talk if the environment fails; that doesn´t happen to snakes, which hiss all the same whatever happens around them.

okay, well it is difficult to interpret other people´s dreams, because they mostly respond to contents that are known only to the dreamer or not even that. Dreams are when our brain is the most active, and the sensorial input is kept to a minimum (though still playing a role, such as when central heating is not working and it starts snowing in our dream). All that happens in the dream is You, all the characters and events are you; not exactly your ego, but the unresolved structures that need to release their energy through images or symbols.

Thus, the emotions you feel in the dream are important and you need to think of them. They are charges that you have not relieved in your wake time, perhaps because they did not turn up in your conscious room. For example, you can feel fear, or lust, or homesickness, and the symbols or images (all you experience and do) during the day did not prompted their manifestation or it was repressed because you had other things to do.

If these dreams repeat (same feelings associated with similar or different images) you need to allow that energy that is accumulating to come outside. Sometimes by merely expressing it and recognising the feeling, but also by using their power or charge to carry out procedures that fulfill the unresolved tension.

"To me, getting Trump out of office is the priority, and I want the candidate with the best chance of accomplishing that all important mission." That is exactly how we vote in Spain; we vote AGAINST and rarely pro. The result is that each new president is way worse than the the other, and the next one might very well be a monkey from Gibraltar. Forget about Trump and think of contributing the best candidate for all the country. If you can´t provide that, why should not partisan people vote for Dems? Real Madrid won the last three Champion leagues. They did so partly because is a team´s motto that what others do is not important, but what we have.

the actions leading to the creation of the Taliban were spawned by other factors. We can follow the lead all the way back to the Big Bang. A society begins to improve when they don´t put the blame on others. Here in Spain we could totally blame Russia, Germany, communist volunteers everywhere for the Civil War in Spain and the great divide it allowed to open and it is still bleeding. But that would be "empowering" only from a feminist or victimist point of view. I´d rather think that Spanish people can help themselves instead of blaming others.

you don´t need actual personal psychopaths, but a system that acts like one when it is needed. Which is Law: Law is a psychopath, because it cares not for feelings, or offending people with sentences, and is concerned only with its self-preservation.

Also the Sun Tzu´s Art of War would help to conceive the same strategy

the Gaul Wars, by Julius Caesar. He conquered this vast and very hostile region for Rome, and then wrote a best-seller. We used to read it in high school for Latin practice

the fox study is interesting as it is part of a range of studies, leading to the conclusion that a limited and identified set of genes are important to create domesticated phenotypes across different species, including humans. Humans, foxes and dogs all share certain adjustments in their gene expression to tame them and make them more social and female-like. Humans, dogs, cats and other species are all part of a single process that lead to the domestication of these different species that gathered around hominid settlements for food and safety. Bonobos too are thought to be undergoing a process of self-domestication.

homosexual behaviours are observed in many species; however, homosexuality as a personal identity is far from universal. Homosexual tendencies are shaped by culture; just like the pitch of our voice, the way we walk or how we deal with conflicts. So there are many different ways of being homosexual, just like there different ways of being hetero. XXI homosexual culture has many anti-social values: a great hostility to tradition; body cult; hyper-sexualization and hedonism; vanity; irresponsibility; intolerance.[/b] It is natural that religious people are disgusted by the gay culture, as their lives are guided by opposite values. LGTB and gay activists have been widening the gap between traditional families and homosexuals for decades, because they are informed by a socialist, confrontational view of the social world. The good place of gays in Western societies, relies on political power too much and on being acceptable by common people too little. Gays as a community need to be more open-minded, and change their values and then Christians and Jews will accept them a lot better. Stop using the word homophobia for a start. Don´tdemand respect, earn it by finding and promoting better role models for the young gays.

"The war on drugs and the war on terrorism are both sham operations which set up new profit making operations." Bitter Crank, making a conflict profitable is a crucial part of winning a war; because usually wars are lost when you go bankrupt, like the USSR in the final eighties. Or Germany, that 30 years later would have probably won WW2 (as the Arab world, including Turkey, were Hitler´s allies and petrol and other resources would have continued to go to the Reich, as well as volunteers).

I don´t think the war on drugs or on terror are shams, because they respond to very real phenomena such as the dangerous cárteles in Colombia, México, Venezuela...and Islamic terror started in the VII century and it is global. However, it is true that the strategies followed have not worked at all.

a country is conquered when it is invaded quick and with resistance. If you are patient, you don´t need to conquer; you have demographic jihad and subsequent hegira to non islamized regions. It is the same approach many Germanic tribes followed in the Roman Empire: they simply emigrated to the Roman provinces until the Roman societies could not assimilate them anymore and turn them into Roman citizens, as they did with Spaniards after two centuries of resistance (from then on Spaniards became as Latin as you get)

Brzezinski did what he had to do following the book: help Muslim factions kill each other. Islam is a fire, and we have been giving fuel to that fire in industrial amounts since the start of the Oil Age more than a century ago. This was the real price of free energy, together with global warming, population bomb, and massive loss of diversity. A way to fight that fire is to bring it upon itself, by arming different factions that hate each other more than they hate the infidels. However, the approach was short-sighted as best. Perhaps it would have been better to arm a secular, anti-islam faction, and negotiate with China and Russia the set up of a regime neutral to all powers. Democracy would not be an option, because the country is run by tribes and democracy doesn´t work on a tribal and patriarchal network. A citizenship would have be slowly built, women would have to have less children, an internal cultural revolution (based on the pre-islamic past, like we did in Europe in the Renaissance) would need to be supported. Two more generations, and until them, the doctor prescribes an authoritarian transition to keep peace and order and to make changes possible.
This is what I would have done! I don´t know if it would have worked, but what was actually implemented did not work so...

coins do not play any factor in economy either...I think you mean money, which is a thought, and thoughts are conditioned by biology and culture. "If it was found to be genetic in some sense and this was proven beyond a doubt it would be interesting to see how religious anti gay people reacted". Well, they would react similar to how they react when it is proved that violence or gluttony is in our biological nature. They´d say: but we also have a spiritual (or cultural) nature that must play a role, or we are just chimps.

Dawkins is not a good source for this discussion in particular. He probably thinks that milk conspires with coffee to enter our bodies every morning and create the kind of metabolisms that will want more milk to be produced.

it´s not possible that some cancers are entirely environmental. You need a human being to develop the cancer, and the human being is shaped by genes. Genes that are working differently to those of ratopín rasurado (sorry, I don´t know the name in English), that prevent any cancer from developing at all in these animals. Likewise, there are no entirely genetic cancers either; the cancer needs food, oxigen, water to grow and that comes from the environment. The distinction inherited/acquired is a practical one, to help doctors focus on possible remedies, but it´s not an accurate description of what really happens biologically.

"in a perfect world, the judge would be able to press a button and instantly alter the brain/mind and behavior of the offender, and would immediately set them free because they no longer pose a reasonable threat to anyone" That´s not what a perfect world looks to me VagabondSpectre. It is Stalin´s, Mohammed´s, Mao´s perfect world, but not mine because I think human beings have souls that need to be respected. Even dark souls need some respect, for the sake of the standard we (people who believe in human rights) want for Human kind.

A kid is totally responsible for his small actions. Responsible comes from response; the person doing the harm is the agent whose response you want to improve. The kid responds to stimuli, and changing those stimuli you allow the kid to change his behaviour without even touching his physical brain or giving a good wash. If the kid gets fun from not controlling himself while playing, then let´s remove the fun by linking being so antisocial with no videogames for a month.

Children or animals are not computers; computers are tools. Tools do not matter, because they are not part of something greater or meaningful: they aren´t meaning-makers, entities that experience the world subjectively and contribute to the cosmic soul.

It is real in the same sense that what happens in a videogame is real. The videogame interacts with the real people and machines outside, is determined by them; but the dragons, green skies, dark galleries or your avatar in the game aren´t real at all. All we ever experience in life is inside the videogame, and that is a good thing because that´s how you can get points and win fights. Our sensory system is really an advanced simulator in real time, an interface.