• What is freedom?
    ↪Amity
    Thanks! My theory is that every thread should have a theme tune, because communication requires and assists a community to come together, and music is the food of love. :wink:
  • Climate change denial
    We definitely need to follow the climate change money. — Agree-to-Disagree

    So follow it. Try not to keep going in a circle though.
  • What is freedom?
    Freedom is when we do what we want to do. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Yes, you said that, and then you said it is when we avoid doing what we don't want to do, and then t
    you said it is when we do what we think to do.

    I disagree.

    I'm not sure what you mean by "mechanical." Thought is mechanical to the degree that nature as a whole is "mechanical." — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Why do you think that? I say thought is mechanical because it is binary (true or false) operates with opposites and the nearest it can come to freedom is 'choice'. But choice is just an unresolved conflict. whereas freedom is beyond thought, it is the new.

    The idea of self-tyranny or slavery to one’s thoughts and desires is an odd one because one cannot be a slave to himself, both master and slave at the same time. — NOS4A2

    It is an odd idea. But the ideas of slave and master are already very odd. But one experiences things, and then finds ways to talk about them. Men put other men in chains and beat them if they do not obey. One learns to obey, because one cannot escape.

    One is enslaved by the master, but one is enslaved equally by one's fear of a beating. And if the slave is enslaved by his fear, the master is also enslaved by his desire. The master is addicted to power and luxury, and his fear is that the slaves will revolt and enslave him in turn and beat him. This is the story of unfreedom, of being a slave to desire and fear. This is the life of a well trained dog; this is not freedom for slave or for master. So it seems that no one can be free, while another is a slave - maybe one day...

  • Climate change denial
    Here is an interesting article to read :grin: — Agree-to-Disagree

    It's not interesting. It doesn't follow the money. The only fact is that the government is spending money on climate research (and presumably on mitigation measures, but the distinction is not made). But there is no explanation of any financial incentive for anyone to persuade the government to act in this way. government is creating research, and government is creating a green industry , and these new industries are creating the crisis? It doesn't make 'follow the money' sense because no one has a money motive for doing it. Why invest in green energy rather than oil? Not a hint of a tint of an answer. No financial motive even suggested for any conspiracy.

    Established financial interests can and do conspire to distort science and influence governments Oil industry, tobacco industry, pharmaceuticals, agro chemicals. Where is the financial interest in your conspiracy? There is none, because there is none you have mentioned, and there is none in the feeble article you cited. Because all the industries that might have such interests have been created by the supposed conspiracy they are supposed to have conspired to create.

    It's nonsense on stilts, and straight out of the kindergarten playground of unimaginative reflecting of complaints with zero attention to good sense. It has become the tactic of first resort these days.

    "The oil industry is cheating."
    " No, the green industry is cheating."

    The first claim is supported by motive, leaked documentary evidence, campaign funds records etc etc. The second has nothing. not even a suspect to accuse.
  • What is freedom?
    How are we free unless our actions are ruled by our thoughts, unless we act for a reason? Surely, completely arbitrary action isn't freedom, right? — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Do you think that anything that is not thought is arbitrary? I would say rather that thought is mechanical, and not free at all. You see I suggested that desire controlled us and you replaced it with fear. and now it is thought. It seems to me that freedom is what you want rid of, what you want to control and fix. But freedom isn't like that; from freedom comes the new, whereas desire and fear and thought are always about the past. Freedom is the unknown, and the unthought. It is creativity.
  • What is freedom?
    we might think some circumstances we find in something approaching a "state of nature," for mankind are not good: widespread food insecurity, constant band level warfare, thralldom and slavery for the vanquished, male relatives exerting undue control over their female relatives' romantic relationships, infanticide etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    We do think it, and we are ruled by that thinking. But what of freedom?

    My suggestion is that freedom is the starting place, and we immediately make rules about it.
  • What is freedom?
    The more we know, the more we are able to shape states of affairs such that circumstances we desire obtain. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Or we could try shaping our desires to the circumstances.

    But personally, I prefer to leave things the shape they are, and not be a slave to circumstance or desire.
  • Climate change denial
    ↪Agree-to-Disagree
    Well there's some Orgs spending money, but are they making money? you know like Big Oil, and Big Pharma? Show me the commercial interests distorting the science, not governments responding to a crisis. There's a big difference.
  • Climate change denial
    Do I need to make the argument that conspiracies of the poor and powerless are not worth worrying about?
  • 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.
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