Its empire baby, and this train ain't stopping until she derails. The latest emperor is a huge fan of professional wrestling and a reality TV star in his own rite. According to the National Science Foundation one in five Americans insists the sun revolves around the earth. The rest seem to be in denial that they have mob rule and are simply going on inertia and are desperate enough to vote for anyone who promises them real change from corrupt politics as usual despite the fact their candidates have been promising that for the last century.

Note that both presidential candidates would have already been put in jail if they were mere peasants like you and me. Running around groping women and sending classified emails by the tens of thousands over an unsecured server would land almost anyone else in jail. The bankers that caused the economic collapse by committing outright fraud never saw a day in jail. The billionaire mayor of NYC who arrested 26 reporters in one day merely got a slap on the wrist and told never to do that again, which is what they routinely do to the bankers who are still getting caught committing fraud every chance they get.

Its the best justice that money can buy which is why people are now rioting in the streets and snipping cops from rooftops. Its also why America has the lowest voter turnout in the developed world and why in ten years of asking I have yet to hear a single person tell me the simple distinction between a lynch mob and a democracy. Its gotten so wild that the comedians are now routinely complaining they have too much material to work with.

In over ten years of my asking if anyone knows the simple distinction between a lynch mob and a democracy I have yet to hear the correct answer and over half the people I've spoken to online have admitted that they are suspicious of the dictionary despite being unaware that it merely contains common definitions listed in the order of their popularity. Its Three Stooges slapstick of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and reflects the mindless mob mentality where everyone chooses between the lesser of many evils and argues over the definition of stupid and who is the better example.

But, please, don't let me deter you from joining the mindless mob arguing such distinctions.

Ok, I see what you are saying. I meditate so I can see directly that when thought stops contentment arises and that is the lowest possible energy state of the complete system (the brain). But probably the lowest energy state is sleep or death. and harmony acts but doesn't reason, if it didn't how could harmony exist? Harmony needs action in order for it to exist. Where is the harmony in a completely still nothing?

I don't see how you got "to be or not to be is not worth considering" from "Socrates said death may be the greatest of all blessings." How does all of this making to be or not to be is not worth considering? Because I would be so content that it wouldn't matter? AKA: — intrapersona

Death is not a complete system. A car engine idling nicely is a complete system expressing the lowest possible energy state, while engine parts scattered around a garage is an incomplete system that must first be assembled.

Harmony is not any particular action, but the relationship between different actions. If the car engine is not properly tuned it will not express the lowest possible energy state but, instead, it will rumble and backfire and whatnot. A more common example in physics is two pendulum clocks hung on a wall which will vibrate or shake the wall compelling one another to eventually swing in unison. Once they do swing in unison they no longer have to vibrate the wall to maintain the relationship.

They form what is called a self-organizing system and if I bump one clock the wall will help to absorb some of the energy preventing the two from swinging further out of sync. Similarly, during an earthquake the two clocks will swing wildly out of sync absorbing some of the energy and helping to preserve all three. This is the same principle used today to prevent skyscrapers from swaying too much and it expresses the resilience, efficiency, and creativity of a self-organizing system, but when they swing in unison they neither act nor reason to maintain their relationship.

Contentment comes at no cost nor does death. When we die, all our trials and tribulations are over and you could say that death is similar to the harmony of the lowest possible energy state in that respect.

I'm certainly no expert on Nietzche who's work has never interested me, but the two sentences make for great jokes. Often I tell people the moment I become perfectly humble I insist the whole world know.

Why does virtue make to be or not to be not worth considering?

Why does wonder/wisdom make to be or not to be not worth considering?

Because they are so interesting, pleasurable? Interest or pleasure is an extension of the human experience much like my right pinky toe is too. Claiming Interest or pleasure is a purpose for life is absurd. You might here a great many people claim "The very sole purpose of my existence is to experience Interest or pleasure" but this makes as much sense as to say "the very sole purpose of my existence is to experience my right pinky toe".

Does contentment come at no cost though? Truely? The farmer has to work hard to pay his bills so that he can be content. Monks have to work for it by meditating all day. The experience of contentedness is a rare sight too, all around the world minus a few primitive tribes. — intrapersona

Harmony neither acts nor reasons, and contentment is the harmony of the lowest possible energy state of the complete system, when we no longer make distinctions between who we are and what we are doing. Instead of seeking happiness or pleasure or viewing work as drudgery, we merely accept them as we accept everything else in life including the evidence of our own senses and sensibilities. Which is why to be or not to be is not worth considering and why Socrates said death may be the greatest of all blessings. When we no longer make distinctions between who we are and what we are doing each moment can be a blessing.

I used to live near the North Carolina - Virginia boarder where the locals were famous for their gracious southern culture and elaborate child rearing traditions that produced adults who could charm the pants off a snake. Andy Griffith was from that area and he was actually one of the least charming. Seriously, to this day some of these people can charm the pants off a snake, in part, because they never take themselves seriously and don't let it go to their heads. To them, its just life and who they are while, these days, being content even with who you are is considered synonymous with being a loser.

To be or not to be is never the question when virtue is its own reward and wonder the beginning of wisdom, while contentment comes at no cost.

A woman from a Yanamamo-like tribe moved to NYC to taste the Big Apple. When reporters asked her first impressions in moving from the stone age to the modern jet age she said she had no idea that people could be so lonely all pressed together on the streets like cattle. She had grown up surrounded by the same thirty people seeing at most a handful of strangers a year without a radio, mailman, or even books and had never felt that lonely in her life.

The many worlds interpretation exists to preserve determinism.
Many experts hope this interpretation is true because it can be mathematically modeled.

If the universe is truly non-deterministic then that could mean there will never be a theory of everything that describes all of the universe's forces and natural laws. — m-theory

This is archaic thinking to say the least. A shadow is non-deterministic, yet we can still calculate its impact and origins. In fact, you can't have a perfect shadow because virtual particles will always appear out of nowhere. What it requires is a systems logic that can express everything both causally and acausally. A Theory of Everything and Nothing.

Using determinism as a yard stick for the value of non-deterministic theories is absurd.

I'm all for some version of retrocausality. But you are invoking a globally general version that again betrays perfect world thinking and not the fuzzy logic approach that I would take.

This thermal view of time says the past is pretty much solid and decohered, the future is a bunch of open quantum possibilities. And then quantum retrocausality would be about very local and individual events which are criss-crossing this bulk picture.

The bulk seems definitely sorted in having a sharp split between past context and future events. But on the fine grain, past and future are connected because - as with quantum eraser experiments - the context can take a "long time" to become fixed in a way that then determines the actual shape of the wavefunction. It is only in retrospect that we can see all that went into its formation.

The trouble with Asian metaphors is that culturally they lack mathematical development. So they are inherently fuzzy in being verbal descriptions. At best, using proto-logical arguments, they are proto-mathematical. — apokrisis

My book is an attempt to bring that kind of mathematical formalism to Asian philosophy. Essentially, it assumes the law of identity goes down the nearest rabbit hole or toilet of your personal preference allowing even the mathematics to always remain context dependent. Rather than a metaphysical approach that builds from the ground up, it takes the top down approach of merely sorting all the metaphors for any humble and elegant simplicity to make both more and less sense out of observations without requiring any assumptions other than that the law of identity must vanish into indeterminacy.

From what I read his vision of time is merely begging the question and splitting semantic hairs. Calling something random is like saying it has no properties and does not exist. He is circling the drain, so to speak, and attempting to do much the same thing that I am doing with my own writing using a more western metaphysical approach. The problem is he is mixing metaphysics and metaphors leading to a contradiction. Without a demonstrable definition for what random means he is essentially using metaphors in an attempt to describe everything metaphysically.

Again, the second law of thermodynamics has proven to be violated on micron scales and smaller meaning that entropy can decrease. A scrambled and fried quantum egg will reassemble itself and there's just no way metaphysics can explain the inexplicable any better than mysticism can. God may be able to see the back of their own head without a mirror, but the rest of us don't have that luxury. The implication is that all of fuzzy logic implies a yin-yang systems logic is required that can express both causal and acausal perspectives with a common shadow being an example of the acausal.

Whether we see a shadow as the absence of light just depends upon the context and, for example, in a dark room what was a shadow can become a faint blob of light because it isn't so much an effect of scale as it is how humble the specific context and its contents are relative to the observer and each other. Mathematically speaking, photons experience isomorphic space-time meaning they don't distinguish between forward or backwards in either space or time just as we might say that shadows don't distinguish between space or time. Photons are also instantly absorbed and emitted and appear to have no independent identity of their own merely conveying any energy and information with perfect fidelity just as a shadow can be said to merely convey the lack of energy and information instantaneously with perfect fidelity. The opposite is also true and in a dark shielded vacuum chamber virtual particles will appear out of nowhere because a context without any significant content is both physically and conceptually gibberish. Mother nature's mindless sense of beauty and humor can resemble that of a toddler, yet, the human eye is sensitive enough to detect a single photon ensuring that nobody is ever left completely in the dark.

Shadows express the same principle that can be applied to everything that a context without significant content and vice versa is simply physically and conceptually impossible. It would mean that thermodynamics need to be reformulated along the lines of Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory, but as a systems logic that expresses retro-causality. The past merely represents more of the geometry of the universe that we can perceive and the future more of the time, but the two can exchange identities. In order to prevent the past from dominating the future its own synergy leads to the future normalizing any individual contributions of its contents.

Synergy itself becomes context dependent because it can be perceived as normalization.

That's close to my own thinking, but was obviously written before the discovery that the second law of thermodynamics is violated more frequently the smaller anything becomes and completely ignores the Quantum Zeno Effect. The simplest explanation is that time can flow both forwards and backwards because a context without significant content and any content without a greater context is a demonstrable contradiction. In other words, the synergy of the contents of the past ensures the void of our future always has some significant amount of content making our lives appear fated at times, while that content in the future normalizes our past, ironically, ensuring that our lives are not entirely fated. Its enough to make Zeno's head spin, but its a more Asian metaphoric take on the issue.

The branching isn't assumed. It's just the natural interpretation. That's what the summing over paths is about. The difficulty is in coming up with a coherent interpretation that omits the other branches. If the other branches aren't real, then what causes the interference effects? — Andrew M

The branching is an artifact of quantum mechanics still being formulated using classical mathematics when all the evidence, including macroscopic evidence, indicates nature is fundamentally analog and what is required, at the very least, is some sort of fuzzy logic variation on the excluded middle. That includes modern quantum mechanics which are formulated as wave mechanics according to the Schrodinger Equation.

My own belief, is the law of identity is going down the nearest convenient rabbit hole or toilet of your personal preference. Hence, the reason quantum mechanics are formulated in infinite Hilbert spaces, yet, the same mathematics display no preference for the arrow of time and the last hold-out for the arrow of time, the second law of thermodynamics, has proven to be violated experimentally the smaller anything becomes. Time is running backwards on smaller scales indicating that the contents of the past are synergistically producing contents in their own future which, in turn, is normalizing the contents of the past with the overall effect sometimes resembling infinite universes merging into one and, at other times, resembling the future determining its own past.

We simply don't see broken eggs reassembling themselves because the human mind doesn't work backwards.

Global trade is at the point of a gun and an estimated 1,700 international conglomerates that essentially control the markets. He who dies with the most toys wins with the US having a military equal to the next six or seven largest combined to back up the value of the dollar and enforce globalization. Its empire baby and this train ain't stopping until she derails. The number one manufactured export of the world's largest exporter is weapons, while when money does all the driving nobody is steering because that kind of money takes on a life of its own.

Rather, the revolt comes from the ability to see the situation for what it is without flinching or distracting oneself from this idea. — schopenhauer1

The revolt comes as a result of our inability to occupy the lowest possible energy state. When human behavior is examined within the context of known physical laws, rather than idealism, it makes a great deal more sense. Hippies like to say, "When harmony is lost, balance will be restored" which leads to harmony eventually being restored. It is where physical laws and our emotions meet that the most interesting observations can be made, when the only thing we might know is nothing, but that's how we can sometimes learn the most interesting things because it provides the necessary analog perspective. The ultimate analog perspective being that it is the greater context of the Truth which determines the identity of everything else.

Existentialist angst can be interpreted as merely a dark school of comedy and what Camus is actually asking is what is the value of our emotions. If the universe were merely logical and ruled by causality then suicide would seem to defy causality and logic with the question becoming why to do we even have emotions. Studies of generosity and altruism indicate that they support the ongoing evolution of the species and often promote reciprocity. Hence, by philosophy examining how supposedly irrational emotions promote rationality and evolution it can answer more of the Big Questions.

Globalization will start to take on new meaning in the near future as environments around the world start to collapse. Already there has been a mass exodus from Africa into Europe and within twenty years northern China is expected to become the next great dust bowel.

Motion does not have to be constantly sustained by a mover? What have you been smoking, Galileo? :-} — SophistiCat

I actually had a guy from Pakistan the US military was teaching nuclear reactor physics too call me a liar when I casually pointed out heavy objects don't fall faster than lighter ones.

Photons have no known independent identity of their own conveying energy and information with perfect fidelity, being instantly emitted and absorbed, and experiencing isomorphic space-time. In other words, their behavior is the same as that of their own shadows which don't recognize space or time or display any identifiable contents. The implication being that photons are made out of empty space and the Unruh Effect suggests at relativistic speeds space itself becomes a wall of radiation. It should be tested within perhaps three years at accelerators.

Last year a mathematical study indicated that, assuming quantum Indeterminacy rules the universe, then the vanishingly tiny effects of gravitational time dilation may very well explain most of the weirdness we see in the behavior of quanta. The tools to test the idea might require three years to develop, but the implication is that simply adding what we consider small amounts of mass when they form atoms is enough to explain the collapse of the wave-function. Which actually means there may be no collapse of the wave function because what we are viewing is merely juxtapositions. A shadow, for example, can be said to behave in a similar manner to quanta which can be described as yin-yang dynamics and the Monstrous Moonshine Conjecture being confirmed means the toolbox of physicists to explore quantum mechanics in the everyday world is now beginning to the cover the basics.

Quantum simulators and topological insulators are the hot thing because quanta being analog it means you don't need a full fledged quantum computer to do a wide variety of calculations. Analog is the more duh!, kick the damned thing approach that, nevertheless, can be incredibly fast, efficient, and even creative. It also means that just understand the analog language of nature could provide a wide variety of cheap and easy to use tools. With the first publication of the 500 states of matter it means the dream of the alchemists should be accomplished within the next century.

A good example of analog quantum mechanics is physicists recently discovered a combination of materials that self-organize to produce what they call quantum logic gates which can then be mixed and matched in a variety of ways to form a full fledged quantum computer. Nature herself, can provide the simulators with a little encouragement because she's a bit vein.

An infinity here, an infinity there, and pretty soon you're talking Big Science. Quantum mechanics are formulated in infinite Hilbert spaces or universes, but the mathematics also display no preference for the arrow of time. The implication, as far as I'm concerned, is that we are observing a universal recursion in the law of identity and there is no humanly discernible explanation. We are using nature to study nature, while the void laughs in our faces, yet, like ants climbing the Empire State building we cling to our belief that we can grasp the reality of our situation by merely climbing higher. Only God can see the back of their own head without using a mirror and when we no longer make distinctions between who we are and what we are doing we embody the truth. That makes life and the laws of physics metaphorical rather than metaphysical and there should be times when we perceive both nonlinear spatial and temporal effects that resemble universes and different times merging, thus, conflating the identities of space and time in every way imaginable.

There is no such thing as a perfectly opaque substance because, if nothing else, quanta will always teleport right through anything. My own view is this reflects the fact that metaphysical extremes are always forbidden. For example, you might ask if a black hole is transparent and the answer is yes. Whatever goes in comes back out again in the form of virtual particles because the black hole's event horizon is where its normalized contents exchange identities with the greater context preventing metaphysical extremes such as someone creating a rock so heavy even God can't lift it. This supports the principle of Baryon conservation in quantum mechanics which insists that information is never destroyed or lost.

Even in a sealed vacuum chamber virtual particles will appear out of nowhere and the human eye is sensitive enough to detect a single photon. Meaning that, metaphorically speaking, things are transparent to ensure that nobody is ever left completely in the dark.

Donald Hoffman is a Game theorist who spent ten years running one computer simulation after another and studying the latest revelations on the neurology of the brain before finally concluding that, according to all the evidence, if the human mind and brain had ever resembled anything remotely like reality we would have already become extinct as a species. Which, of course, means that his discovery can be considered just more self-contradictory nonsense along the same lines as quantum mechanics that, nevertheless, appears to be much more useful than anyone's silly ideas about reality and causality. In recent decades these zingers have kept coming nonstop with the scientific evidence rapidly accumulating that life, the universe, and everything revolves around bullshit, or what's missing from this picture, and what we consider real and unreal, true and false, serious and funny, existent and nonexistent, causal and acausal, simply depends upon the context.

Without realizing that they had corroborated this, a group of mathematicians examining all of classical mathematics and physics concluded that any number of simple metaphors can describe physical causality equally well. If you want, you can take your pick from among countless explanations to describe everything as merely consisting of black holes, balls of string, bouncing springs, clockwork, or lotions in motion on vibrating rubber sheets for all I know! Along these same lines, a similar mathematical study established that only two dimensions are required as if, in reality, life were a cartoon. Like Donald Hoffman before them, the mathematicians have rigorously confirmed is that academia has traditionally relied upon what I like to call "Cartoon Logic" which is the logic of small children who will adopt whatever rationalization happens to appeal to them more at the time or conflicts less with reality as they know it.

We are using nature to study nature, while the void laughs back in our faces without the slightest compassion for all of our hard work, sacrifices, good intentions, deeply held beliefs, and thousands of years of progress and tradition.

Well, just how united we ever were, from the earliest settlements on, is debateable. — Brainglitch

All too true, but its becoming harder to even keep up the pretense. A man who fled the former Soviet Union was asked by reporters his first impressions of the US and his response was, "We knew we were being lied to!" Conan O'Brien does a regular routine where he has his staff record fifty talking heads all spouting the same B.S. verbatim off a teleprompter and his audiences just laugh and laugh.

It is a well-known fact that tiny banana Republicans are the ones who compensate by buying the biggest guns. — Brainglitch

Which is often their own undoing. Divide and conquer is simply not a viable long term internal strategy making any country ripe for invasion or other outside influence. The Russians now attempting to influence a US election is a clear indication they know we are no longer the "united" states.

What? To dismiss speculation as unphilosophical is a big mistake. — Metaphysician Undercover

Philosophy is defined as the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline, while Socratic philosophers like myself prefer to define it as the love of wisdom. Speculation is neither knowledge nor wisdom, although, it can be useful for making money or any number of other ventures such as writing fantasy novels.

Yeah, the idea of people arming themselves to oppose a tyrannical government is quite ridiculous at present. That would only possibly work if we were talking about some tiny banana republic. — Terrapin Station

The Pentagon alone spends as much in a single year as most countries make. I've met dozens of generals and admirals, CIA spooks, and you name it. Once I met Stormin' Norman Swartzkopf in the Crystal City underground, an entire city dedicated just to selling things to the Pentagon with their underground walkways preventing spying eyes from watching what it going on. Americans sold their country to the highest bidder long ago explaining why in ten years I have yet to find a single person who knows the simple distinction between a lynch mob and a democracy and why we have a military equal to the next six or seven largest in the world combined for "defense" purposes, while people riot in the streets.

The original intent of the second amendment was that a well armed citizenry can prevent or, at least, deter any attempt at imposing tyranny. Cannons were among the weapons that were originally covered by the constitution, but I can't buy a nuclear tipped cruise missile to defend myself against tyranny. The billionaire mayor of NYC arrested 26 reporters in one day and only received a slap on the wrist, the bankers that collapsed the economy did so using outright fraud and never saw a day in jail. Money is the new tyranny and one the snipers shooting cops they blew up with a bomb disposal robot. The Pentagon has been investing heavily in robots, drones, and swarm technology, while the NSA is routinely reading the emails of a third of our population. Your gun rights simply don't serve the purpose the constitution was written for anymore. In fact, your constitutional rights have been suspended indefinitely and the military has been given the legal authority to round people up like cattle, while if you or I did the things either Trump or Hillary did we'd be in jail.

When there is no justice in or out of court and people are rioting in the streets and sniping cops from rooftops debating gun laws and whether vaccinations impose on our individual liberties is insipid to say the least. So much for libertarianism. They talk the talk and never walk the walk. Liberty for sale to the highest bidder.

I already explained the empirical difference that it makes. Since it makes an empirical difference, it ought to be testable. Were you listening, or do you simply reject, and forget, everything which is not consistent with your belief? — Metaphysician Undercover

Speculation is not philosophy and claiming nothing changes when everything demonstrably changes is not making an empirically testable hypothesis. Mathematics must be demonstrable, self-consistent, and nontrivial and so far what I hear is merely trivial speculation.

The geometrical "point", being non-dimensional, and occupying no space, really can't exist, in the sense that a physicist would say "exists", it is purely conceptual, theoretical. But we can describe it in a demonstrable way, like the exact centre of a circle, or the point where a tangential line meets the arc of a circle, so it is not gibberish. It's good theory, but cannot have physical existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

You can describe it merely in terms of gibberish! Mathematical gibberish, but gibberish just the same that has no demonstrable physical reality. Along the lines of me saying you have an invisible pixie on your shoulder that can't be detected which can just as easily be described as inhabiting the center of a circle and having no spatial dimensions.

Now the op proposes that unlike the point in space, the point in time has real physical existence. What exists at a point in time can be nothing other than a state, because no time is passing, so no change occurs. What we observe as change and motion is a series of such states, like the still-frame movie. Real change occurs between these still frame moments, such that we do not observe real change. It's what happens between the still-frame states which we observe in rapid succession as movement. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's again, just gibberish. Either you can show how it makes any difference with empirical evidence or its nothing more than fanciful speculation. I could also come up with any number of complex ways of describing time that are perfectly workable, but nobody would give a crap because it can't be proven and there's no point in adopting a more complex view of something without evidence when a simpler view will produce identical results.

A philosophy without any reference to physical reality is just someone's fantasy. Zeno's followers merely used reductio ad absurdum arguments to entertain the mindless masses. The One Greater Truth is that the truth is never merely content, but the greater context that sheds light upon everything.

A context without significant content and any content without a greater context is a demonstrable physical impossibility as well as conceptually impossible. A statistic of one is an oxymoron, yet, obviously statistics have value!

Academics tend to be in complete denial that there is more in heaven and earth than dreamt of in their philosophies and, like ants climbing the Empire State building, they refuse to accept the possibility that they can never grasp the reality of their situation by merely climbing higher. Yet, the worst possible tragedy is to become afraid of the light, the worst possible tyranny is denying the evidence of our own senses and sensibilities, and the worst possible failure is losing faith in our own journey. To be aware we must first embrace our own ignorance, to have a friend we must embrace being a friend, to appreciate more of the humor and beauty in life we must first embrace them in ourselves, to actualize our full potential we must be willing to embrace our own flaws, and to truly live we must first embrace life more fully. For no man is an island nor can he be the measure of all things lest he embrace virtue as its own reward and wonder as the beginning of wisdom knowing that the only thing he can know is that he knows nothing.

"Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.[1][2] It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.[3] Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.[4] As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."[5]"

You can split semantic hairs all you want, but the definition of consciousness is as wishy-washy as they come. We have two words, I assume, because they are useful for different things.

If it has no spatial extension then what's the point? To a physicist if you say something has no properties then it just doesn't exist. Either you can describe it in some demonstrable terms or its gibberish.

Consciousness is obviously an emergent phenomena with my own belief that it displays supersymmetry and self-organization indicating that there should be four rudimentary types of consciousness with, autism, being perhaps one example of a distinctive type of consciousness. Where the mind and brain meet is the particle-wave duality of quantum mechanics and the two have already been documented as substituting for one another sometimes for greater efficiency and Penrose's suggestion of quantum microwave vibrations in the brain has received two confirmations.

Notably, recent research has brought to life the revelation that the immune system is largely responsible for how social we become and intimately tied to how our brains function. The implication is everything can be considered social because its all pattern matching all the way down and consciousness can be considered a social act. This is related to the lowest possible energy state of the system providing a natural explanation for why we often perceive time speeding up and slowing down because even time can be viewed as social.

I don't see why you say this. "Moment" is used in a number of different ways. 1) it is used to signify a brief period of time, as you say, 2) it is used to signify a point in time. Under the second way, it is a point in time, just like a point in space. The point in space is dimensionless, free from spatial extension, just like the "moment", as a point in time is free from temporal extension. — Metaphysician Undercover

Still don't understand how a moment can be timeless. Either it has duration or it infinitely short, which case, its difficult to see why its worth distinguishing.

Content and context are not ideal opposites, like up and down, which are absolutes that are defined by each other. Content, is in principle, separable from context, and that is why the same content can exist in many different contexts. Or, we can describe a context without any content, such as a fiction. But we cannot do that with ideal opposites. — Metaphysician Undercover

Everything being contextual makes everything much more metaphorical and obey pattern matching and self-organizing principles. That is, everything can be analyzed for both both juxtapositions and flow dynamics using the same metaphoric systems logic. Its the principle of Doctor Doolittle's push-me-pull-you and Tom and Jerry casing one another in circles so fast you can't tell what the hell is going on if anything. The more confusing a situation becomes the more important it is to pay attention to what's missing from this picture so you can retrodict and learn more about what you do not and cannot know.

Its analog logic that requires a little more swing in your hips because its more organic looking for what's missing from this picture. That's how it defeats metaphysics which is the alternative you are proposing because quantum mechanics and other observations suggests the context alone can run circles around any metaphysics because it alone can express what no single metaphysics can. In fact, a mathematical examination of causal mathematics and physics concluded you can take your pick from among any number of simple metaphors to explain everything causally from rubber bands to balls of string, bouncing springs, clockwork, or whatever. Life is just more complex than metaphysics alone can explain.

Right on the mark. Note the observation about 'changing democracy into dictatorship'. — Wayfarer

That's the polite way of saying we've merely traded one mob rule with more of a pretense of democracy for one that has fewer illusions. Its a rude awakening for many of the democrats and republicans alike, but at least its more honest. It is what the I-Ching describes as a possible "turning point". Hitler's Nazi Germany had its ugly side, but that is precisely what the German people needed to come to the realization of after the war, that they could not continue on with business as usual constantly going to war with their neighbors and supporting their traditional extreme authoritarian culture and bigotry.

So there's the big elephant in the forum...

Does anyone have thoughts on what this might mean? — schopenhauer1

Its like I keep saying, in over ten years of asking if anyone knows the simple distinction between a lynch mob and democracy I have yet to hear the correct answer. You simply can't have a democracy when nobody knows the meaning of the damned word and spends all their time arguing over the definition of stupid and who is the better example. What you have instead is Mob Rule. Its empire baby, and this train ain't stopping until she derails.

The money is doing all the driving because the lights are on, but nobody is home. Ranting and raving and complaining or even rioting won't make any significant difference because nobody is listening. At best such things will only temporarily address the worst symptoms of the problem. Your constitutional rights have been suspended indefinitely and almost every police department in the country has been buying surplus military equipment, while congress has already given the military the legal right to round up citizens like cattle and made all the necessary preparations to do so.

Sooner or later people might catch on, but I'm not holding my breath. The real worry is that the US could produce the next Adolf Hitler.

Assuming that the passage of time is discrete, as you say, let's say that there is a moment, which consists of a very short period of time. That's the inverse of what I said, that there's a moment which consists of no time, then a short time passes between moments. The difference, is that from my perspective change occurs between moments and from your perspective change occurs within the moment. If it is as you say, what do you think separates one moment from the next, in order that the passage of time can be discrete? — Metaphysician Undercover

A moment that consists of no time is a contradiction in terms and there's no way to tell what you might mean by that other than to guess you are possibly suggesting that time is illusory and everything is fated.

Its quantum mechanics that says time is discrete, while my own view is everything is context dependent. That means there is no way to ultimately distinguish between one moment and the next and indeterminacy applies to everything because its a universal recursion in the law of identity. Hence, the reason even the causal theory of Relativity has established that space and time are indivisible and the theory contains the Simultaneity Paradox where two observers can witness the same events occurring at different times.

We perceive moments as separate and discrete, yet also flowing and indivisible, because a context without significant content is a physical and conceptual impossibility along the lines of insisting you can have an up without a down or a back without a front.

Peace man, nice poetry. — Punshhh

Its Rainbow Warrior poetry that's a mixture of Socratic wisdom and Taoism. Beauty and humor are viewed as indivisible complimentary opposites. That same poetic imagery can also be interpreted humorously. For example, what Lao Tzu said was, "Habits are the end of honesty and compassion, the beginning of total confusion!" Frank Zappa said something along the same lines when he said, "You are what you is, and that's all it tis!" The eternal moment is when we no longer make distinctions between who we are and what we are doing.

The past is only a memory, the future a dream. Pale Buddha

Lao Tzu came close to saying the same thing, but what it means is the present moment is where the greater context of the future meets the contents of the past. It provides an explanation for why time appears to slow to a crawl during an ecstatic moment and such phenomena as the Quantum Zeno Effect as simply due to the greater context and its contents appearing to exchange identities.

You can think of it as the future normalizing the past and the past synergistically producing the future. Both synergy and normalization increase along with their content with Russian nesting dolls providing an analogy of their context dependent synergy and normalization. As the number of parts increase their synergy diminishes their individual impact until the two exchange identities and vice versa. The largest Russian nesting doll can be considered content until you open it, at which point, it becomes the greater context for the smaller doll inside with each successive doll having a less distinctive image painted on it and less distinctive shape. The smaller the dolls become the harder it becomes to distinguish between what is content and what is the greater context and if you were to continue that progression they would eventually become entirely indistinguishable with quanta, black holes, and an ecstatic moment providing extreme examples.