Finish the story as you see fit. — frank

Then they had a fight and all died.

There is no impossibility that there should be an uninhabited land; it is only a contradiction that a land uninhabited by humans is inhabited by humans.

The other contradiction is that there be a community of the unsocial. The wild frontier tends to have a Davy Crockett king, and is always temporary and moving on - it is currently located on the Moon and Mars, and Elon Musk is the self-appointed King.

As someone who grew up in a severe branch of the Plymouth Brethren, that has made me value the truth. — Andrew4Handel

But did they or do they really believe it or was it an entirely faith or fear based belief, or a mixture of social control, fearmongering, hope and conformity etc?

To my mind that level of indoctrination warrants someone to put a very high value on the truth including for one's own sanity. — Andrew4Handel

I too value truth highly, and for the same reason.

But it seems to me that the Plymouth Brethren also value truth highly. They think they have found the truth in the Bible, and do their best to live by it. In fact, I venture to say that despite much that has been said here, everyone values the truth. What would be the point of making an enquiry or attempting to respond to one if one did not value the truth? A billion doubloons or a sack of rotting fish heads.

The difficulty is though that we are not terribly good at getting hold of the truth, and some folks settle on the Book, and hold to that, and some folks affect indifference and think it sophisticated, and some few of us are continually looking for truth and poking at what we find wondering if it is the real thing or not. One learns to be cautious, anxious, and somewhat provisional in one's claims, because one sees that it is easy and comfortable to suppose one is rich in truth, when one is rather poor. This is a little bit I've got hold of, and I think it's about right. Give it a poke and see what you think.

the concept "determinatio est negatio",as it is highly developed in Part Four of Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" — quintillus

It's been a long time since i read it, and it wasn't much fun as I remember it. But as I think - please correct if I am misremembering - Sartre was responding to the occupation of France by nazi Germany. It was from WW2 that certain principles evolved that set limits to the writ of law and scope of authority, such that, the concept of an 'illegal order' entered international law, along with crimes against humanity, and so on.

That is to say that one has a choice — no choice but to make a choice, even under coercion, to obey or disobey. Law-makers are necessarily free to make moral or immoral laws, and folks are necessarily free to obey or disobey, and in this way personal responsibility always obtains.

Thus @Cheshire chooses to waste time and money complying with a law, probably in order not to waste more time and money dealing with the consequences of refusal. Either way he is responsible for his own acts, and his obedience is not in itself a defence. Sartre basically invents a new sin of criminal obedience.

But I do resent baseless accusations. — Vera Mont

So you don't value truth, but you resent falsehood?

That seems a bit negative...

Proveit! — Vera Mont

Why? Do you value truth or something?

Three pages of lies. And nobody cares.

If you chose The Siren, you would feel like The World's Idiot for the rest of your life. — hypericin

Not if I was right. The odds that I uniquely am the sailors lovely frog daughter are surely very small indeed if it is a unique occurrence. It is as unlikely as that a frog should be mistaken for a horse. And that is my gamble, not the one my father made.

The odds favour the siren of fertility, and my own beauty confirms it.

Or...

Philosophy is like a swamp. Swamps are for staying out of, in the first place, and for getting out of if you can in the second.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in.

[Chorus]
But I mean no harm, nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him. — a mother's son

The Sailor's Child problem, introduced by Radford M. Neal, is somewhat similar. It involves a sailor who regularly sails between ports. In one port there is a woman who wants to have a child with him, across the sea there is another woman who also wants to have a child with him. The sailor cannot decide if he will have one or two children, so he will leave it up to a coin toss. If Heads, he will have one child, and if Tails, two children. But if the coin lands on Heads, which woman would have his child? He would decide this by looking at The Sailor's Guide to Ports and the woman in the port that appears first would be the woman that he has a child with. You are his child. You do not have a copy of The Sailor's Guide to Ports. What is the probability that you are his only child, thus the coin landed on Heads (assume a fair coin)? — wiki

This version looks a lot clearer to me, and the question at the end looks like a deception. 2 possible worlds, contain 3 possible identities. So other things (ie coins) being equal, I am more likely to be one of two than one of one. So P. (only child) is 1/3 notwithstanding P. (heads) is 1/2, because tails is twice as fruitful as heads.

We need to look to matriarchal cultures to know a better way. — Athena

Certainly! And matrilineal, more importantly. The need for patrilineal patriarchy to control female sexuality is fairly obvious, but it certainly predates Christianity, and is extant in the classical world of Greece and Rome. I commend to you The White Goddess, by Robert Graves, a man, as I am a man, but a poet, and servant of the muses. It is a long book with lots of words, but looking back to a time hidden from us before the takeover of Zeus, and JHWH, and all the wretched gods. It may seem a bit peripheral, but to find the negated history of Western matriarchy seems like an important step towards understanding those few cultures in which it still survives to an extent. But perhaps it is only men who need such searchings...

All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean—

In scorn ofwhich I sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom I desired above all things to know,

Sister ofthe mirage and echo.

It was a virtue not to stay,

To go my headstrong and heroic way
Seeking her out at the volcano's head.

Among pack ice, or where the track had faded
Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers:

Whose broad high brow was white as any leper'
Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips.
With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips.

Green sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir
Will celebrate the Mountain Mother,

And every song-bird shout awhile for her;

But I am gifted, even in November
Rawest ofseasons, with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
I forget cruelty and past betrayal.

Careless of where the next bright bolt may fall. — Graves

An analogy: supposing understanding to be finite and measurable, and to be held by a being as a box holds its contents; as no box can be big enough to hold itself, so no being can have a complete understanding of itself.

Consciousness according to some mysterians is, or at least results from, that necessary incompleteness. Even if the superior alien had a complete understanding of human consciousness, from their own point of view, they could not understand themselves with the same completeness, and would have to 'project' their own incompleteness of self-understanding onto us to fully understand us in our incomplete understanding of ourselves.

Shimples!

That’s because I know you cannot name one reason. You don’t have any reason. — NOS4A2

Of course I don't, you have already convicted me of joining the conspiracy against Trump. :rofl:

Give me one reason why I should believe any of it. — NOS4A2

No. you give me one reason to believe that the jury and the justice system and now the whole city is so corrupt as to be completely unbelievable and totally ignored. Everyone in the whole world can be convicted in your mind except Trump. Bizarre.

↪unenlightened I’m not so sure they can be so neatly separated. — Jamal

The tool-maker makes the tools he uses to make tools, but he is never using the tool he is making while he is making it. — unenlightened

Ever the Marxist, eh? The point is to change the world. That's fine by me; I'm just pointing out that using philosophy is not making philosophy.

Everyone loves the tool-maker, and everyone uses the tools he makes for the purposes they have. The carpenter says that the purpose of tool making is to enable wood-work. The stonemason says the purpose of tool-making is to enable the shaping of stone. The beautician says...

The purpose of the tool maker himself is to make tools. He is important to every function because he has none of his own.

Any time one has a use for philosophy, one is not doing philosophy, but rhetoric. The tool-maker makes the tools he uses to make tools, but he is never using the tool he is making while he is making it.

There is no evidence. Her claims of sexual assault can be discarded along with her accusations of rape. Believing such accusations without evidence says a lot about character. — NOS4A2

A jury has convicted. Now miscarriages of justice can happen, but at this stage, your claim that there is no evidence itself requires evidence in the form of a detailed rebuttal of the prosecution case.

There is no evidence that there is no evidence; on the contrary, the conviction is positive evidence that there is convincing evidence, because a jury has been convinced. You have to provide evidence that they have been corrupted or misled, that will convince us otherwise, if you want to be taken seriously.

Women, blacks, the seas, the forests, the soil, fossil fuel, fossil fertiliser. Looks like we have run out of things to exploit. There is one thing left, disaster.

https://tsd.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine.html

You are not alone; but you are relatively alone here because philosophy is still male dominated. What you need is "feminism". A deal of folk think that to take women seriously means to treat them just like men. That has led, not to the valuing of child-care and caring in general, but to its industrialisation, so as to free women to become wage slaves. That this "liberation" has proven unsatisfactory is unsurprising.

I, nor I fear any here, can direct you competently to the wealth of material available, but assuredly, the analysis and deconstruction of Dick and Jane has already been done for you, Women's Studies is a thing, and Feminist Philosophy, though it lacks any representation here is quite well developed. You need to go talk to your peeresses first, and then come back and educate us neanderthals.

To the modern, self-centred mind, the logic of rationality measures everything in relation to self interest, as expressed mathematically in game theory. It follows immediately from the definition of love as being other-interest, that it is considered irrational.

And yet it functions perfectly well in the world, where parents sacrifice their own interest for their children's, because the world does not believe in the absolute separation that characterises linguistic thought.

It looks to me, my lords, as if the motte is the ideal place from which to attack the bailey. If that is your target, join your enemy up there, and together attack the wretched bailey full of peasants and swine, that is causing all the strife.

Or is it the motte itself that is your real target, and you are attacking that, by way of first taking the bailey? In that case the dissimulation is on your own side.

Language is a social construct. As such it attains to significance at all only in virtue of the restrictions that are placed upon it. Thus while it is permissible to call a spade a hand held personal earth-moving device, it is not permissible to call it a butterfly sandwich.

Of course if you want to talk to yourself in your own private language, in your own private echo-chamber, you can do what the fuck you like, but as soon as you are talking to other people, there are rules, because there is interaction. Generally, fraud, deception, threats and bullying, and various sorts of wind up and manipulation are frowned upon.

One might liken free-speech to the free market. The market is only free if it is regulated to exclude shysters, robbers, fraudsters, and so on. In the village market, one can rely on the honesty of neighbours who will have to come back again and again to the same customers, but in the global economy, and the tech-economy that no one is ever able to be competent in all fields, regulation is essential.

We can argue about the rules, that's one of the rules, but to suggest that there be no rules is to run around naked in public screaming "look what I've got!" — Thanks, but no thanks.

Free discussion amongst equals is how truth can prevail, but only amongst honest equals committed to the project that truth should prevail. There is no education to be found in the talk of the dishonest, the foolish or the insane.

Freedom comes from order, not chaos. We have the freedom of the skies because the skies are heavily regulated, to the extent that even flocks of birds have to be dissuaded from flightpaths of aircraft.

capitalism itself — jorndoe

Is capitalism itself though, or is it something else?

Do the wretched Ruskies not have access to a stopcock somewhere, if they want to cut off the flow?

I'm starting to wonder if capitalism is entirely fair?

Are well informed rational people better than ill-informed irrational people?

When science has replaced philosophy, such questions will no longer be asked.

But man must eventually learn right from wrong good from evil and hence morality. — invicta

We usually say that the beasts are innocent; that their kindness and cruelty are innocent because they do not know right from wrong. Man knows already, and having lost innocence, is always in the moral conflict, choosing now one, now the other. Another way of putting this is as a split in consciousness, such that one second guesses what one has the urging of desire and fear to do, with ideas of what the m(other) requires one to do.

"Eventually", man will move 'beyond good and evil' through enlightenment. This is a reintegration of consciousness that resolves the conflict of good and evil in similar way to the way that the innocent awareness resolves the conflict of desire and fear. But the worst evil of all is the pretence that it has happened when it has not.

I think it is an Indian tradition, but it describes my own theory of child rearing — that the way to treat a child is as a distinguished emissary from a distant land to be at all times respected and deferred to, and allowance to be made for their unfamiliarity with local customs and language. Toughening up is for a young Rhinoceros, not a human. No human is self-sufficient nor should they be. One seeks to understand ones' child, and in that mutual learning from each other there is only the burden of an expanding self.

So, 'no', is my answer. The difficulty I have experienced, though, has always been in trying to discourage my children from education. It takes the resources of a government to manage that!

True, the same word may be defined in many different ways. The Merriam Webster dictionary for "fire" lists almost 42 different uses. — RussellA

I can well imagine an audience of philosophers looking up the word in Merriam Webster and discussing back and forth which of the 42 definitions applies in the particular case while the auditorium burns around them. Not.

First language, then definitions. Let us talk about language before definition, before dictionaries, for a moment. The language of a child. For example: my daughter would hear us saying things like "Can you do that on your own?" And being independent minded, she soon started to demand, "Let me do it on my rown!." Now you will not find "rown" in Merriam Webster, but we knew what she meant, as does everyone reading this.

For example, if something is fully X then it is not not X. — schopenhauer1

Where X, with deep irony, stands for anything at all. And what is this "not"? It must be an unsaying, like the all clear after an air-raid warning. Panic over!

When one shouts "Fire!" in, say, a theatre, one does not mean merely to refer to "the rapid oxidation of a material (the fuel) in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products."

Rather, it is a call to action in a matter of life and death. One means 'evacuate immediately, bring an extinguisher, call the fire brigade, wake up and stop watching the play, Sauve qui peut.

In the trenches, it means something else again.

In another thread, https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14286/a-potential-solution-to-the-hard-problem, the beginnings of consciousness are posited as being in evaluating sensations. I propose that not naming, but evaluation is the beginning of language; the first word was something like a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

I would ground meaning and language in the same giving-a-fuck-icity. The Boy who cried 'Wolf!' is not a tale of someone describing the fauna, but of someone calling falsely for help, and how that falsehood undermined himself as a communicating member of society.

And when we hear that "the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold" we should understand that the word 'wolf' is being used in the same sense, with the same urgency of meaning, and not merely "... the largest extant member of the family Canidae, and is further distinguished from other Canis species by its less pointed ears and muzzle, as well as a shorter torso and a longer tail. Wiki.

Analiticity surely comes much later, when wolves are not much problem any more, and we can start measuring the length of their tails. Certainly one does not begin with Euclid's Elements.

The sound of the dinner gong does not indicate a concept, it is a call to arms.

I'm not familiar with Adorno, but going by this crib-sheet, he seems a bit unenlightened.

Adorno’s moral philosophy is similarly concerned with the effects of ‘enlightenment’ upon both the prospects of individuals leading a ‘morally good life’ and philosophers’ ability to identify what such a life may consist of. Adorno argues that the instrumentalization of reason has fundamentally undermined both. He argues that social life in modern societies no longer coheres around a set of widely espoused moral truths and that modern societies lack a moral basis. What has replaced morality as the integrating ‘cement’ of social life are instrumental reasoning and the exposure of everyone to the capitalist market. According to Adorno, modern, capitalist societies are fundamentally nihilistic, in character; opportunities for leading a morally good life and even philosophically identifying and defending the requisite conditions of a morally good life have been abandoned to instrumental reasoning and capitalism.

https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/#:~:text=Adorno%20argues%20that%20the%20instrumentalization,societies%20lack%20a%20moral%20basis.

So a movement of resistance to the dehumanising tendencies of 'the establishment', as arbitrary rules about hairstyle, sex, venal politics the Bomb, The Vietnam war the cold war, the prison of consumerism and suburbia, etc, could not sustain itself, and dissolved into the same greedy and unprincipled mess that it had set itself against.

Adorno argued that a large part of what was so morally wrong with complex, capitalist societies consisted in the extent to which, despite their professed individualist ideology, these societies actually frustrated and thwarted individuals’ exercise of autonomy. Adorno argued, along with other intellectuals of that period, that capitalist society was a mass, consumer society, within which individuals were categorized, subsumed, and governed by highly restrictive social, economic and, political structures that had little interest in specific individuals. For Adorno, the majority of peoples’ lives were lead within mass, collective entities and structures, from school to the workplace and beyond. Being a true individual, in the broadly Nietzschean sense of that term, was considered to be nigh on impossible under these conditions.

Rejecting the great god Mammon, the hippies became mere thieves, no different from their forebears. As the poet put it at around the time—

Well, six white horses that you did promise
Were finally delivered down to the penitentiary
But to live outside the law, you must be honest
I know you always say that you agree
Alright, so where are you tonight, Sweet Marie? — Absolutely Sweet Marie

I'll leave this here with little comment, as it hits that personal blindspot where I cannot distinguish wisdom from folly.

https://oscillations.one/Assets/Publications/The+Holographic+Sky

But if your bullshit detector hits the red, you can retreat to the safety of Penrose's theory:

https://richardvnd.medium.com/conformal-cyclic-cosmology-is-the-end-of-the-universe-the-beginning-b8bd70b5b712

But it seems to me that Kant had it about right in pointing out a peculiar difficulty with conceptions of time and space, whereby one cannot conceive of a limit without conceiving of 'beyond the limit', and neither can one conceive of the absence of any limit. Time and space are the conditions of thought, that thought cannot contain.

Hence the seeming identity of deep theoretical science and psycho-ceramics, and thus my blind spot.

I find it amusing. If one were to speak of a spirit world from which we descend to be incarnated in the mundane to -say - determine or build our characters, and whence we return on death, one would be banished to the religion forums and not even the philosophy of religion forums. But this is speculative science!

None of the people I'm accusing of laundering money even live in my country, so all local police needed to do is forward the evidence to the Financial Intelligence Unit who would forward it to Interpol. It's a lot more effort to (as you point out) to write hasty analysis that can be easily proven false. — boethius

Now it comes a bit more clear to me. It's nobody's business to care a damn, and you are making work for them that they will get no credit for. So they set the village idiot to write a report that looks like a whole load of wild accusations with zero evidence, and there we are, Boethius is paranoid, case closed, time for a long lunch.
There's not even enough sense to prove false, and if the worst happens, the village idiot gets a reprimand. It's a very familiar scenario, that Mrs un and I have been through a few versions of. Whistleblowers tend to be accused of something to shut them up. Nobody wants to investigate middle class and upper class crime, it's too close to home.

Yes, it's badly written, which is another point I've made which is just "how do we even know what's meant?" — boethius

What is shocking is the lack of clarity about what are undisputed facts and what are your claims and what are 'their' claims/interpretations. This is so basic and important in matters legal, that the report is actually useless and uninformative. I don't think the quality is good enough for it to be a big conspiracy; it looks more like like some half-educated rookie saddled with making a report to close the 'case', that was never really opened, and no one was ever going to look at.

I'm a native speaker, not a lawyer, but somewhat familiar with formal language.

[Boethius] has justified cause to believe that the police is planning to murder him due to the reports he has filed. — prosecutors in my country

This is ungrammatical; it should be "police are planning". That strongly suggests that this was not written by a native speaker, or at least not an educated one.


In several emails sent to different recipients, [Boethius] has stated that the police have committed a number of different offences. [Boethius] has stated that he has reported the offences he suspects, including but not limited to money laundering, aggravated fraud, aggravated extortion and a variety of offences involving business operations, to several parties. He has contacted the [baddassery] Bureau of Investigation's Financial Intelligence Unit last April, but did not receive any reply or enquiry regarding the evidence he presented. He has also reported the matters in person at the [baddass] police station, the [baddassery] Bureau of Investigation, the [badder ass] police station and the [baddest of all asses] police station. He was ejected from the [badder ass] police station. In addition to the police failing to investigate the matters he has reported, [Boethius] has justified cause to believe that the police is planning to murder him due to the reports he has filed. The investigations against [Boethius] himself are groundless and caused by the reports he has lodged. The police, prosecutors and judges are covering up corruption and are thus involved in the offences, such as money laundering and corruption. In addition, [Boethius] suspects that police documents are being edited and/or deleted. In his emails, [Boethius] mentions by name [Beevus], [Butthead] and [Squeebo], among others.
— prosecutors in my country

The whole thing is badly written, the first two sentences both report what B has stated explicitly, firstly in emails, and secondly in an unspecified way, that might be verbal, or carved in tablets of stone, we don't know.

the third sentence, beginning "He has contacted..." would normally be taken to be reporting what B has done, and not be a continuation of things B has stated. And certainly the implication of the phrase, "[Boethius] has justified cause to believe that the police is planning to murder him due to the reports he has filed." cannot in formal English be construed as being that B himself states that, but rather that the reporter is reporting it. But what reporter would report that with no detail on the justification or any supporting evidence?

However, given that it is badly written by a non-native speaker, it has the general look of a report intended to entirely be of claims by B which were expected to be treated as fantastical. Hence - no further action. I'm wondering though why a dismissive report would be written in English at some trouble, and done so badly. Is it possible that your complaint had an international aspect and that this was a token arse-covering report to Interpol or someone?