• Climate change denial
    scientists who are funded by "Big Climate"? — Agree-to-Disagree

    Who are they? Multi-National windmill manufacturers?
  • What are you listening to right now?
    ↪Amity
    Sandy Denny was better than Joan Baez better even than Joni Mitchell at expressing the emotional intensity of a lyric. You need more...

  • What is freedom?
    You may search
    At any cost
    But how long
    Can you search for what’s not lost?
    Everybody will help you
    Some people are very kind
    But if I can save you any time
    Come on, give it to me
    I’ll keep it with mine     — Bob Dylan

    When I am most free, I am least concerned about freedom and have no feeling of freedom. I make no choices at the crossroads, but dance to the rhythm of my heart.

    I am in free-fall, glad at the next moment to be arrested by my parachute, and strung up in the sky. Perhaps to be unburdened, to be without connection, is not after all to be free.

    But instead to want to be nowhere else but right here, right now, laboriously explaining the obvious again.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Hey guys, the Donald would not appreciate you talking about each other on a thread that is all about Him!
    "That's very very bad folks! I will get you all back on topic, which is my greatness, or lock you all up and build a wall round you, that you will pay for.'
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Mikie
    Imagine yourself having a serious conversation about Spanish politics, in Spanish, with a native speaker of a different political persuasion.

    And breathe.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Here the opposite happens. — javi2541997

    Well Spain is a very different place to the US, or the UK where I am. That might account for our different intuitions. Living with Franco after the civil war, I can see that 'the left' would look disorganised by comparison. And certainly an apathetic to hostile working class can also be a major problem for the left.. I'll just say that Trump is no Franco, and America is not in a state of economic collapse. But nor is it immune from fascist takeover.
  • Let’s play ‘Spot the Fallacy’! (share examples of bad logic in action)
    What's fun here is how few folk on a philosophy forum understand what a fallacy is. — Banno

    A fallacy is what results when the fallible philosophise. Fortunately, we have enough gods among us to keep us from failing and falling into fallacy when it matters. (excuse my effing).
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪javi2541997
    You don't have to convince me that the right can win elections and be more popular than the left. You have to convince me that they favour widening the vote and not restricting it.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    It is literally the contrary. When people have more access to voting, the number of votes turns right because the citizens tend to be more conservative than leftists statistically. — javi2541997

    It literally isn't, because citizens tend to be more leftist than conservatives statistically. But literally provide any evidence of what you say, because all the evidence I see is that the right wants to restrict the vote and the left wants to expand it in every case I know of, whether it is blacks, postal votes, women, young people, whatever.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    It is almost inevitably the case that making it easier to vote tends to favour the left, and making it harder favours the right, because people with mobility problems are more likely to be poorer, and poor people are more likely to be left wing.

    But the democratic principle must be to let everybody vote as easily as possible, not to put barriers in the way of, say, people who have to use public transport during a pandemic.

    So postal voting is only a 'steal' tactic if fraud is taking place, not if it favours one candidate. Rather, measures to limit the vote, even if disguised as 'security measures' are an attempt to steal, unless there is evidence of widespread fraud that needs to be curtailed.
  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.
    You're making the very simple, complicated. these are not equations, but evaluations of f for all the possible values of a & b. the right hand side in each case is the result of simplifying the left


    (4).

    = (because n= . )

    = f.

    And this means that when a = n and b = n, f can = n or m. And thus we have the shape of the flip flop circuit.
  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.
    ↪Moliere
    I'm struggling to see what you are trying to do there. you want to be simplifying, not complicating.

    You cannot begin at the deepest level because re-entry makes it infinite. So you simply evaluate each case as it stands, and the f drops out in every case except the last one, where everything else drops out. It is because the f doesn't drop out that there are still the 2 possibilities for its value.


    Wait, I think i see what you are doing - treating each line as an equation, and then substituting the right back in for f.
    You don't want to do that! Each line is a result for a combination of an and b. There is no working shown, and almost none to do. so for (2):–

    =

    and the re-entered f can be ignored.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Poor old Trump, the media star, never gets a fair break from the media, does he?
    Poor old Trump, the compulsive litigator and packer of the supreme court, never gets a fair break from the law.
    Poor old Trump, not a dollar to his name, working hard for the people for no personal gain.

    Just like Jesus really.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    It is clear that the Public is easily manipulated by its media. — yebiga

    As soon as that is clear, worrying about election rigging and democracy is redundant. The people who pull the strings of the public will pull them anyway. This is a claim that is made by *looks around at presidential history* Reagan and Trump, the media star presidents.
  • Climate change denial
    Sick, insane people. — Mikie

    The lunatics have decided to remove the foundations and fly the asylum to the land of freedom. I don't think they'll get very far, but I wish i wouldn't be buried in the rubble.

    When politicians try to repeal the laws of physics, people die, but the laws stand firm.
  • Climate change denial
    Come gather 'round people
    Wherever you roam
    And admit that the waters
    Around you have grown
    And accept it that soon
    You'll be drenched to the bone
    If your time to you is worth savin'
    Then you better start swimmin'
    Or you'll sink like a stone
    For the times they are a-changin'.     — Bob Dylan
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪jorndoe
    That is rather interesting.

    Particularly the equivalence drawn between Bernie and Donald. I'm reminded of the French revolution as much as of the rise of Fascism in the 30's. A system that cannot adapt fast enough has to collapse, and that is what consensus politics is doing.

    "Heads must roll" is the new consensus, but also "Not mine". The contradictions are obvious. The turmoil will not lead to what its instigators want though, but to a political system that will address the new imperatives - to Green Fascism. We will face reality eventually, when everything else has been tried and has failed. And by then the global power will be China, because they already have the autocratic system in place, and have already shown themselves capable of radical change of policy.

    In the dispute between liberty and the laws of physics, liberty is bound to lose.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Well aren't we all putting on our wigs and getting excited! I maintain that the defendants version of the truth is liable to be that they are not guilty, and then their lawyers' business is to make this somewhat credible. Accordingly, a lawyer who warned in advance that one's proposed actions were illegal would be ill-placed to mount a defence thereof.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Except criminal lawyers, whose job is to represent the client's version of reality.
  • There is no meaning of life
    ↪hypericin
    Apologies.
  • There is no meaning of life
    What part (if any) does the notion of legacy via reproduction or via human memorialisation of a life now past, or perhaps both, play, in your notion of living a meaningful life? — universeness

    For humans, it seems to be very important, at least to most folk most of the time, and to some extent for other intelligent and particularly for social animals. Those who find they are unable to reproduce often feel a personal meaning void, as do those who do not know anything of their ancestry - foundlings.

    The feeling that no one cared for one's infant self or that there will never be an infant other to have that relation to can be devastating. These are matters of fact. for example

    https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/28/adoption-foundlings-psychiatry-ian-palmer
    https://www.verywellfamily.com/signs-infertility-has-hijacked-your-life-1960006

    Meaning and caring are very close.
  • There is no meaning of life
    I would suggest that his formula is "@niki wonoto means nothing", and that the form of meaning is X means Y. — hypericin

    It is your suggestion so the form of meaning is the form of meaning to you.
    Therefore,
    (The form of meaning is X means Y) to @hypercin.
    Whereas.
    (The form of meaning is X means Y to Z, seems a bit more complete) to @unenlightened.

    That you disagree seems only to emphasise the importance of Z that you merely remove and put at the beginning.

    Life, that is here proposed as meaningless, consists of a separation of the organism itself from the environment and the reproduction of itself. But the separation is only partial and functional, because the substance and energy for development, maintenance and the reproduction process is taken from the environment. So life consists of a partial separation and a relation of dependence and interdependence. Meaning arises in the organism's evaluation of the environment - food or poison - am I your dinner or are you mine? Such judgements are of import (meaningful) to an organism; thus meaning is the common term in a relationship. Gazelle means life to a leopard, and a leopard means death to a gazelle. Life and death are the beginning and end of meaning.

    As such, it becomes apparent that "life", considered as the whole of the environment and all organisms as a whole, cannot be in relation to anything else such that meaning can arise. Even God needs to create the other as creation, in order to produce the relationship that He calls 'good'.
  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.
    Conference anyone?

    https://lof50.com/?fbclid=IwAR0X6ywUWXj9i2peYoiUXxFxmEdv05n_HZWuxdfWc2rm-xGAdrxexcDZErY
  • Climate change denial
    ↪Mikie
    It's the alien lizards in charge that are doing all this, Everyone knows they are cold blooded and need the planet to be hotter.
  • Climate change denial
    Russia and Greenland will open up as well. North Dakota will be nice. — frank

    When you have a nice thick heavy ice sheet grinding over the land for a few thousand years, it doesn't do much to improve the topsoil. Greenland will open up indeed, apart from the coastal regions where people live, which will be under water, but the open land will be scoured to bare rock. Perfect for the Flintstones and Asterix and Obelisk. but in a few short decades, pioneer plants will start to build up the soil - dandelions, heathers and the like. In a century or two it will indeed be "nice". Shame about Africa, India Indonesia , etc. though.
  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.
    ↪wonderer1
    Ok, no worries.
  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.
    ↪wonderer1
    Ok, can you explain it to me ? My amazement is that this all rather predates solid state transistors.
  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.
    Wow, if someone implemented something like that we could have computers and an internet! — wonderer1

    Yeah, tempting but stupid. Computer memory is not made of switches. But kudos for bothering to read the thread at all.
  • What happens to reality when we sleep?
    If you are very good, and say your prayers, then Jesus will protect you while you sleep from all the goings on. You would not believe what goes on while you sleep...

    “From ghoulies and ghosties and long leggedy beasties and things that go ‘bump’ in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!”
  • Climate change denial
    There are probably people in some locations who will get more plusses than minuses. Can we expect these people to help to solve global-warming/climate-change? — Agree-to-Disagree

    This is not as likely as you might imagine. The obvious places are the very cold regions like the North of Russia and Canada. But the problem is that what currently lives there is adapted to the cold and will not thrive in the warmth, not just the mammals like polar bear and reindeer etc, but humble lichens. The first thing that will happen is more extremes and instability, that will degrade the environment, melting permafrost, more rain less snow leads to faster runoff and soil erosion. There are at the same time already more wildfires in these areas.

    The problem for any environment is the speed of change. A 2 degree C. increase in temperature is equivalent to perhaps 1000 km move towards the pole, and most plants cannot move that far in a few decades. (These numbers are not to be taken too literally, because life is complicated, and much is still unknown.) The disastrous costs will have a long run though, before any benefits can begin to accrue.

    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0118069
  • An Analysis of "On Certainty"
    I've always related this stuff to justification. To 'know' is to have justification, which is to have evidence. so the problem with knowing that this is a hand is that the evidence is this: *waves hand, slaps the sceptic hard on the cheek*.

    And yet one can be deceived about one's own hand. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3125296/#:~:text=The%20Rubber%20Hand%20Illusion%20(RHI,the%20participant%27s%20own%20occluded%20hand.

    What is certain is not what is known or what is necessarily true, but what one cannot doubt in a particular context, which may be doubtful in another context. if I am not typing on a keyboard, you can safely ignore my post for the nonsense it surely must then be, unless it be from the hand of God.
  • Climate change denial
    Here is a timeline of environmental history, good news and bad news. There's a bit of an American slant, and curiously, no mention of Marcuse that i have come across.

    https://environmentalhistory.org/about/

    I never liked Marcuse, I came across him in the early seventies, but he always seemed to me an exploiter of environmental concerns for political purposes. and his writing style was awful. But as one reads the timeline, it is clear that the poor and working class are the ones who suffer most from pollution and poor environment, because the rich have the ability to live well away from the sources of their income. This is perhaps why one might get the impression that it is a left wing conspiracy.

    But if anyone wonders what environmentalism ever did for us, this timeline has some answers.
  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.
    I'm having trouble, on page 81, of understanding the third step where J2 is called. — Moliere

    Are you looking at the 9th canon where he constructs an ever deepening series of nested a's and b's? Page 55 in my version?
    If so, you just take the whole right hand expression of a & b as = r. and use J2 in reverse.

    This is where I am:

    In effect, when a, b both indicate the unmarked state, it remembers which of
    them last indicated the marked state. If a, then f= m. If b, then f=n.     — p61.

    This refers back to the recursive expression derived from the expansion on Page 55 :–

    E2.

    And also refers back to page 56 right at the bottom:–

    m or n

    This is extraordinary! A circuit made entirely of switches that has a memory!
  • There is no meaning of life
    Meaning is a three way relation. for example, reality means 'harsh' to
    @niki wonoto, or the salmon run means "breakfast" to a hungry bear. The form, in general, is that X means Y to Z.

    but I suspect that when you say 'life', you are speaking personally, such that your formula is:– @niki wonoto means "nothing" to @niki wonoto.

    Which is only to be expected, because meaning is shared, whereas your meaning relates only to yourself. What this shows, and what you claim, therefore is a simple truth, that self-concern, without relation to others is meaningless and ultimately futile. X means nothing to X.

    Whereas I can report to you that self-concern can derive meaning when it is derived from concern for another who is concerned for you.

    X means something to Z.
    AND
    Z means something to X.

    Gives the basis on which

    X means something to X.

    This is the relationship of love, whereby, if @niki wonoto cares about some other who cares about @niki wonoto, then he would no longer find his own life meaningless.

  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.
    Today is Wednesday.

    The above statement is true as I write, but may well be false as you read. Logic would prefer to be timeless and eternal, and has difficulty dealing with the unpleasantness of times changing.

    Six days shalt thou labour and be false, but on the seventh day, thou shalt again be true.

    Here's another related piece, fairly short and understandable.
    http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/TimeParadox.pdf
  • Climate change denial
    The Industrial Revolution started in Britain — Mikie

    [Slight quibble]. It started really with the beginning of the British Empire. Slave produced cotton, and sugar both subsidised and incentivised mass production, transport etc. Slate from Welsh quarries roofed the houses of plantation owners, and the Bethesda quarry owner, for example, was also a plantation owner. And the quarry was an early adopter of a railway to transport slate to the coast for shipment. A similar pattern can be found with the cotton mills of Lancashire, etc.

    In particular, there was a great hunger in Africa for iron, which was hard won by the technology available to them, but which Britain had developed with the exploitation of coal. Slaves were bought, first for iron, and later for guns. The triangular trade - iron from Britain to West Africa, Slaves to the Americas and the West Indies, sugar, cotton and rum back to Britain is what made a small country one of the wealthiest, and most powerful, and drove the industrial revolution.

    (Racism is as essential to capitalism as sexism is to patriarchy.)

    [/slight quibble].
  • Essence and Modality: Kit Fine
    I have not come across a version of essence that is of much use, but I’m happy to gives consideration to any that’s proffered. I’m hoping for something a bit more useful than “what makes a thing what it is“ — Banno

    The essence of a thing is the rigidity with with which we designate it.
    the essence of :—
    Frodo is the ring bearer.
    King Arthur is the legendary hero of an imaginary magical realm on the pattern of Britain.
    Thales is that he fell down a well and thought everything was water, and was one of the founders of Greek philosophy.
    Lavender is the fragrance.
    unenlightened is his willingness to make up shit on the fly.

    I imagine some tedious archeologist finding the remains of a real king called Arthur, and his wife Guinevere, and some record of his reign that did not include quests or saving damsels in distress or the Holy Grail, or the round table. "Oh, that King Arthur, no one is interested in him." I would say, as if allowing that names are not always unique, while maintaining the rigidity of my designation.
  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.
    Let us then consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus (as in Chapter 11), of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam's razor, to consider as travelling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship.
    Now the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.
    Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.

    This is indeed amazing.

    Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all. But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i.e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act* so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.     — CHAPTER 12

    The world is composed of distinctions... — Moliere

    Yeah but, no but...

    I have a problem with putting it like this, because it seems to be making a distinction between what the world is composed of, and What it might have been composed of, or might have been thought to be composed of... But that cannot be. One could at least equally say that the world is decomposed of distinctions. "In the beginning was the Word."

    There is a sense in which there cannot be a world unseen, and a sense in which there obviously can and must be before seeing can arise. There must be physics before there can be physicists, but physicists are nothing other than that physics. But the first distinction is made by the first cell, and then the first re-entry of the first distinction into itself by the first language speakers, and then...

    The Observer is the observed. — Krishnamurti

    Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world. — The Grateful Dead

    I would not say that the world is composed of eyes, but it has eyes, and we are those eyes.

    ————————————————————————

    There's one last bit that I would still like to get a more firm handle on, which is the second half of Ch.11, on memory, counting and imaginary values. The book is incredibly compressed at this stage, and a whole new notation introduced if not more than one. I have a half understanding of it, and my next post will attempt to convey as much as I can of that half.
  • Essence and Modality: Kit Fine
    I remain unsure of what sort of thing you think an essence is. — Banno

    Me too. My first thought was essential oils. If it doesn't have the all important aroma, it ain't lavender. Then I thought of this:
    You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. — Matthew 5:13

    And that takes me straight to 'a difference that makes a difference'. And the difference that the man, Thales, if he ever existed at all, might have made to the community he lived in, is largely unknown to us now, and almost certainly very different to the difference the tradition and stories we currently have of him, makes to us now.

    But worse that that, this sort of 'sine qua non' turns out to be more about the namer than the named. There might well be varieties of lavender with no scent, but they are of no interest to parfumiers, except as weeds to be rooted out of their crop.

    Presumably, under certain rules of succession, there is somewhere, a 'rightful heir' to the throne of France. but nobody cares, because nobody cares, and therefore there is no king of France. So the essence of kingliness is our caring about it???
  • To be an atheist, but not a materialist, is completely reasonable
    ↪flannel jesus
    Well folk do seem to adopt 'isms and defend them against competing 'isms with more enthusiasm than I can find good warrant for, and I don't want to be more particular than that, or further defend a perhaps somewhat impetuous remark of my own.
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