God did it.

Just for balance, this is not a new problem. This from Jan 2021 —well before the launch of JWST.

The number of elements in C1-23152 that were found to be heavier than hydrogen and helium—which astronomers collectively refer to as “metals”—hinted at its strangeness. Metals are produced by star formation, which jettisons them into a galaxy’s interstellar medium through supernovae—making them available for next-generation stars to use. More metals equal more cycles of star formation, and it took present-day massive galaxies many billions of years to become metal-rich. C1-23152’s spectrum revealed the galaxy to be a veritable metal bonanza back in its early days, which means it made a lot of stars very rapidly not long after it first formed.
How rapidly? The spectral features of stars can answer that question, too, because they reveal which ones have elements typical of younger or older stars. The youngest stars in C1-23152 are roughly 150 million years old. The most ancient are about 600 million years old. That means the galaxy made some 200 billion solar masses in just a half-billion years—a rate of 450 stars per year, more than one per day. The figure is almost 300 times greater than estimates of the Milky Way’s current output. If most galaxies are slow-burning log fires, with new flames popping up every so often, C1-23152 is a gasoline-soaked bonfire.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/giant-galaxies-from-the-universes-childhood-challenge-cosmic-origin-stories/

something [that] cannot be experienced and cannot be exactly defined, — ClayG

Is that an exact definition?

But they seem to be sort of polar ends of the self-help / guru mill of philosophy, therapy, and the like. You better find something that engrosses you! You better be more mindful and at peace with just being! — schopenhauer1

I disagree. The shallow end of flow is music and dance. Breath and movement and sound are the same rhythm, and thought is absent. Meditation is the same thing a cappella. To be 'in time', moving at the speed of time is to be fully present, whereas to be in thought is to be absent, in the past, and in the imagination of the future. Wanting is the centre of thought, wanting to be elsewhere and elsewhen, doing and being and having what is not.

How about none of it? — schopenhauer1

How about none of that?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/05/1006008/ai-face-recognition-hack-misidentifies-person/

It's the entanglement. I remember the middle ages when a chap was known to his bank-manager. The other day I went in to register a mobile number and was told 'You could be anyone'. Nobody knows me, and my identity is entirely electronic. My laptop already has one of my fingerprints, my face, my voice; it can also have my DNA. and my bank details. The collective survival risk is of drowning in our own bullshit, magnified and fed back to us by the indifferent machine.

I think perhaps a philosophical discussion needs a linguistic hierarchy of three classes of words. Most words being working class, taken for granted, over-worked and underpaid attention to; then some middle-class words, pedantically defined, and always following the rules of logic; and finally some few aristocratic words that are what the discussion is all about.

Which might suggest that one's philosophical instincts in this discussion are somewhat indicative of ones' class loyalties. Or it might just be a big tease.
———————————————————

I propose poetry as the "art" of language, and naming of ships, species, infants and philosophical -isms as acts of poetry. Here is my argument and reference:— Henry Reed, Naming of Parts.

Art is indefinable as to substance or function because it does not operate in the world, but in the mind, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Poetry restores meaning to language traumatised by politics, advertising and philosophy, and now by robotic abuse too. The business of philosophy, then is to sharpen the tools provided by the poet, not to say anything for itself. That is mere politics –

The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work. — Wittgenstein, PI

That is to say, when the engineer of language is tinkering and tuning.

Of course. Philosophers are the thought police.

Meaning is use, and lies are only useful if they are understood and believed. Therefore the thought police must enforce truth-telling, and arrest the lies, because if lies prevail, all meaning is lost.

Pointing is just a particular kind of handwaving — unless it means something, of course. Then it is sign language.

4: Homosexuality goes against procreation — Katiee

Does it? Does resting on the seventh day go against creation? Does a celibate priesthood go against procreation? Killing goes against procreation, destroying goes against creation.

One might consider that God in His wisdom, knowing that childbirth is risky for the mother, has provided a surplus of effeminate males who will not themselves give birth, but stand ready to take on the responsibility for orphaned children and generally support the community. I don't have chapter and verse for that, but I think He is merciful and wise, so ...

Some people support the local football club and never waver, through good times and bad. Others wonder and question, and others again look for a winner and support that.

Asking a philosopher whether or not to question, is like asking an alcoholic whether rum is good. There is surely goodness in the child's simplicity and trust, and goodness too in the agonised questioning of youth. But with or without questioning, one has to hang one's hat in some hallway or other. The hall I will choose is a place where authority is diffident, and kindness and forgiveness abound, and folks support one another, and are generous to strangers. The logic of their talk is less important.

What would a life without any wants look like? — schopenhauer1

Even jellyfish want light. — Banno

And yeast wants sugar. But there is a difference between the wants that are cellular urges towards needs, and wants that are ideas of the mind created by thought and projected as a better life.
It is the difference between 'enough is as good as a feast' and 'enough is never enough'.

The wise therefore rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies,
by weakening ambitions and strengthening bones.
If people lack knowledge and desire,
then intellectuals will not try to interfere.
If nothing is done, then all will be well — Tao Te Ching, ch3

You are holding now to the standard of necessary truth, not objective truth.
If I take my keys out of my pocket in front of you, then I have demonstrated that my keys were in my pocket; I do not have to prove that they couldn't have been anywhere else. I'll leave it there though, as I don't think there is much to be gained at this point.

It's a metaphor, Jim, but not as we know it. Even the blind are aware of the business of day, and the quiet of night. Looking inward, one sees nothing; one sees the shallowness of self and personality, and at the centre a void, or sometimes the metaphor is a mirror. The mirror reflects everything and is nothing, awareness like the mirror cannot reflect itself but always what is outside and beyond – the world.

If I was the blind leading the blind, i would speak of the un-touched toucher, or the unfelt feeling, the still small voice, the inner warmth, the beating heart, or some other relation, that we might share in our solitary awarenesses.

If only the thread could have been closed after the op.

But now we have to confront the very real possibility that a dick can be excellent when it feels the urge.

And this means that dicks have options that the excellent do not, and the excellent have restrictions that dicks do not. and that results in the triumph of the dicks, and the happy ending of excellent adventures is a fairytale of wishful thinking, or the cover story of a couple of dicks.

If everyone is capable of lying about morals and society doesn’t crumble (but could actually flourish), then I think that a pretty large exception to the so called rule. — Bob Ross

I agree with you. but I do not believe in the flourishing society of liars. You would have to show me a real example, that is not a sub-culture exploiting the majority.

I still don’t see, if I am being honest, how your view has any objective moral judgments in it. — Bob Ross

That's fine with me, I'm not much enamoured of the objective/subjective distinction in the first place. I tried to explain myself in your conceptual language and failed. Or maybe I'm just confused.

According to the video China contained AI, and somehow they are bad guys in the presentation while attaining what the researchers want. — Moliere

Well I think that is good rhetorical tactics; rather than get into an argument that China might be a more peaceful, internationalist, and socially responsible society, just suggest learning from the enemy because they are certainly learning from you. When one has an important truth to tell, one should not cloud it with other controversies unnecessarily. Anyway, the containment is only a keeping hold of the power in a small circle - that might be worse. But now Bob's going to say that I'm promoting deception for the greater good. And i might be, but only as the exception, not as the rule.

Which is pretty much straightforward Kant. Lies need to be justified, and the truth does not.

If your child walks into the road in front of a bus, it's ok to jerk them back to the pavement so violently it dislocates their shoulder. But if you do something like that because they are using the fish knife when they should be using the butter knife, that's child abuse.

Cool, we’re on page 3. Gotta beat Banno’s 8 page discussion on definitions from three years ago. — Jamal

Well if we're playing top trumps, Ogden and Richards managed 295 pages on a single word. And here is a snippet to function as trailer:—

... we have only to notice that if we speak about defining words we refer to something very different from what is referred to, meant, by 'defining things.' When we define words we take another set of words which may be used with the same referent as the first, ie.,we substitute a symbol which will be better understood in a given situation. With things, on the other hand, no such substitution is involved. A so-called definition of a horse as opposed to the definition of the word 'horse,' is a statement about it enumerating properties by means of which it may be compared with and distinguished from other things. There is thus no rivalry between 'verbal' and 'real' definitions.

It might help resolve the difficulty with the science and engineering brigade, too. And note the use/mention distinction making an early appearance in the history of philosophy.

Or, you could do like the mathematicians do, and practise what Jamal calls the fallacy of persuasive definition. — Metaphysician Undercover

What I generally do at about this point in the discussion, is bring out the weapon of mass destruction that is The Meaning of Meaning, by Ogden and Richards. It is the definitive text, and to my mind an object lesson in the futility of trying to define a word and thereby divorcing meaning from context.

When I say 'context', I invite you to imagine not just the words around the word in question, but also the armchair around the philosopher and the ever-collapsing political order in which they are necessarily embedded.

I've said this before, so get ready to yawn. It's the little words that create all the difficulty in philosophy:– words like "I" and "if" and "when", and "thing"and "being" and "exist". People try to avoid the difficulties by making up big words that they think they can control, but then they find all the difficult words creep back into their definitions.

For example in order to know what counts as a definition, one needs to know what counts as a 'count'. And there's no accounting for that, except by making up a story.

I've stolen this link from @Wayfarer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhYw-VlkXTU&t=380s

One of the things it talks about is the possibility of social collapse brought about by the ubiquity of deep-fakes becoming impossible to detect. Worth watching quite carefully, and rather supposing the moral case I have been making.

As I said, English is my first language, sorry to disappoint, I don't know if any language is completely without this problem, but I'm doubtful. — Judaka

Oh, sorry, I was hoping you had some insight from otherness. Now I'm not sure you are saying anything very definite about language as such, but more about our human propensity for prejudice.

I was outlining that 99% of the population didn’t think that there was such a thing as an objective “thou shall not kill”, but they kept promoting it as objective (thusly lying) because they recognize that it would be in their best interest to do so. In that example, lying is predominant and good. — Bob Ross

Right. The way everyone pretends that Father Christmas exists. But that's not deceiving anyone is it? I don't think it's a very good foundation for a society, but such conventions are not lies but agreed performances - like the way every bride is beautiful and babies always look just like their parents.

It's like the idea of 'trickle down economics' — no one believes it for a moment, but they recite it...

That is the ring of approximate truth you have there, from what I hear. But it ain't going to happen, because the EU is well rid, and DeGaulle has been proved right that the UK is not capable of equal partnerships. The EU was a bit of a brake on the rabid right, it turns out, despite being all about capitalism and markets.

The details are in VI 28 and can be downloaded by statistics nerds on the omnisis site above.

Point of order. There is a distinction without a difference, between a sock-puppet and a glove-puppet. a sock puppet being a glove puppet made from a sock.

Every living cell is sensitive to environmental conditions and makes nuanced responses of absorption or ejection of different chemicals. Even my computer is sensitive to passwords and my thermostat to temperature.

I had a quick look, and I am already a direct realist, so of course you are right. I like the analogy of watching the game on a black and white tv. I can remember watching snooker on a black and white set. The commentators had some work to do describing the game. :razz:

We know, 'because science', that eyes sample the sea of photons and we know also that there is a continuum of wavelengths. One makes a spectrum of the light from a star, and finds therein a huge amount of information, that one cannot see directly, and this huge amount of information is potentially available at every point in the visual field. The human eye takes 3 somewhat overlapping samples and we know, 'because biology', that other life forms take more or less samples at each point and see more or less colour-wise. The more different samples, the more information, up to the limits of the divisibility of the spectrum. And yet still, with all this understanding and agreement about how vision works, there is this disagreement - which has to be, surely, about how we choose to think about it, because the reality – the physics is already agreed? And how did that happen?

Because you're important to the town, — Paul

Need more information. If places are being allocated by the town on the basis of importance, how come my friends and relations are also important, and my decisions about them are also important? There's a smell of nepotism about this that I do not want to be part of. I'm sending all the tickets back, until the allocation system is changed.

John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids goes into the way extinction threats change morality, though, and how some folks are slow to adjust. But "women and children first" is an old survival trope, but applies more to women of childbearing age and their offspring than to VIPs and their olds.

Why do you think he does that? — Fooloso4

Dude, psychologising Plato is a big ask, but philosophy is obsessed with the mind, thinking and ideas, and seemingly always has been. This obsession is religious in character, and sets the scene for later religious disembodiments and dualisms. The ratios of rationality were his new gods, and of course the elitism of the educated mind bathes in the light of reason while the primitive barbarian remains in the darkness of superstition...

Perhaps another question, more tractable, and possibly with the exact same answer, would be "Why do we still care why he did that all these years later?"

Except that Plato swaps reality and unreality about, so that the forms are real and the material world the unreal.

All of reality is a prison. The question is, what is outside of that prison? — an-salad

Unreality, aka the world of ideas, aka the world of the forms.

Yeah, they are not useful. This reinforces the view that, for all the "clever", they are bullshit generators - they do not care about truth. — Banno

They do not care — at all, about anything or anyone. Any more than a car cares about pedestrians. They have been given the appearance of agreeableness because we like to humanise them, and this is quite easy because they are entirely selfless, in the sense, again, of not caring about what they are or what they do, or what anyone thinks of them.

I think what i am taking from this fascinating thread is not so much the great achievement of emulating human thought processes, but more the exposure of the unconscious and mechanical nature of human language thinking. We should already be all too familiar with the way that abstraction dehumanises, from the sorry history of the 20th century. AI is the perfect cannon fodder, and the perfect concentration camp guard, fearless and pitiless, the white man's white man, and Cleaver's "omnipotent administrator."

I wonder if you can convey to me how sensible languages deal with all this?
— unenlightened

Seems more of a cultural issue, doesn't it? Language will naturally morph to fill the gaps of cultural functioning and the process is quite efficient. — Baden

When i lived in France I found it easier to understand the formal language of the bureaucracy than the idiomatic argot of the streets, but conversely, the more relaxed and fully articulated accent of the South was easier than the half swallowed machine-gun of Parisian French. The formal language with words like 'convey' and 'sensible', is recognisably the same old French and Latinate derivations, whereas the Norse, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon aspects did not connect.

More cultural than what? Our Norman conquerors gave us the names of the meat – 'mutton' and 'beef', whereas the live animals retained their other already hybrid names , 'cow', 'cattle', 'kine' 'ewe', 'sheep'. English is class-ridden to the extent of abandoning relationships completely on the basis of pronunciation of 'potato', as the song has it. The amalgamation has not quite happened in a thousand years, because the efficiency of the language adaptation is directed in other directions.

This, you thought, was a time for robust attack. — Isaac

I'm sorry you feel attacked all the time. I am not trying to attack you, I am trying to get you to understand something about the way you come across on this site, not just to me, and not just in this thread, but to many people in many threads. Your response is to accuse me of failings I have just admitted to, as if that make me worse than you.

We all feel that sometimes. — Isaac

Yes we do. But you seem to feel it nearly all the time, and in relation to nearly everyone you discuss with. Perhaps I have missed all your respectful conversations with others, and only seen your attacking ones. Perhaps you can point me to some of your more charitable posts.

Oh. So what is? — Isaac

R.E.S.P.E.C.T. An indication of respect is the attempt to charitably understand your interlocutor and then, if one disagrees, to politely explain where one thinks the other has gone wrong, rather than pour scorn and ridicule upon them.

Not, of course that such is universally how I or anyone behaves all the time. But when that is not what happens, the conversation deteriorates. Pulling rank, as you have just done is disrespectful as well as a very poor argument.

Concepts such as intelligence, willpower, procrastination, laziness, toughness, and kindness are some that get muddled by this problem. Using intelligence as an example, we can describe actions, ideas, concepts and systems as being intelligent or stupid. We can also say that it is intelligent to have an intelligent idea or develop a smart system and that it is stupid for one to have a stupid idea or believe in something illogical or nonsensical. — Judaka

English is a dog's dinner of bits of all sorts of languages, and it's a complete mess. You have my admiration and sympathy using it as a second language and trying to philosophise in it.

But in relation to the problem you articulate here, I am so used to saying and thinking such things as 'stupid is as stupid does', that is to say that I detect that someone is stupid if they consistently do stupid things and say stupid things, and if they are not consistent, then when they do, I say they are being stupid — and that's a tense subtlety that is hard to parse — anyway, I am so used to all this, that I wonder if you can convey to me how sensible languages deal with all this?

I'm a qualified, experienced professor with decades of teaching behind me, s — Isaac

There's a lot of them about. Teaching, as currently practiced is very much a one way authoritarian affair. Decades of teaching is a poor qualification for a conversation. And of course it is no support at all for the efficacy of your communication here.

I'm sorry you feel attacked all the time. But you really aren't very good at engaging with people constructively, or putting together an argument. A site like this is bound to expose this, unfortunately.

Did anyone 'teach' you to walk? — Isaac

Yes. I was raised by wolves and taught to walk on all fours. Unfortunately, it looks like bullshit actually undermines critical thinking skills, because 'monkey see, monkey do'. One hears a lot of nonsense being talked; a lot of emotive manipulation, including sarcastic straw man arguments for example, and one actually learns to think in those terms rather than critically.

The suggestion is that 1. people are not explicitly taught critical thinking, and 2. They are not able to do it very well.

So your example of something that is not explicitly taught but that people can nevertheless manage, is entirely beside the point. It is an attempt at ridicule that relies on the difficulty of critical thinking and the tendency of ridicule to provoke anger that clouds judgement. And that is your normal way of discussing on this site. It is bullshit, as @Ying has pointed out, and like walking on all fours, it is an inferior and crippled form of communication that you have presumably picked up from your environment. That this can happen to you is evidence in favour of the explicit teaching of critical thinking.

My main advice is to not spend any time giving attention to those who don't deserve it and only care about gaining attention and power, and politicians are at the top of that list. — AntonioP

This does not work, unfortunately. If decent folk abandon politics, it only makes it even easier for the scum to float to the top. It is a pleasant way to live for the individual, but it does not make things better, but worse.

It would be nice if virtue were rewarded in this world, but it is not the case. The unscrupulous always have the advantage because they can practice virtue when it suits them and become vicious they see advantage in it.

For there to be decent government therefore requires a large majority of decent people actively engaging with politics at every level and trying to root out the demagogues, the corrupt, the chancers, and the snake-oil salesmen. And this oppositional activity must be very carefully examined to distinguish it from the exploitation of divisiveness.

If you agree that people lying about there being objective moral standards (such as “thou shall not kill”) would actually sustain society (or at least not burn it to the ground), then you are conceding that it is possible for dishonesty to function as a ‘good’ thing in society. — Bob Ross

Yes. it is possible occasionally that dishonesty can have good consequences, but not that it is 'a good thing'. It is possible that murdering Hitler would have had good consequences, but not that murdering people is a good thing. It is possible that abortion has good consequences sometimes, but it not a a good thing, in the sense that it is worth getting pregnant for.

I don't know the answer to that. Loss of grooming privileges? 3 lies and you're out?

it seems as though you are claiming that there is some sort of “objective moral law” — Bob Ross

the sort of objectivity I am claiming is the objective inequality I mentioned way back – honesty is moral and dishonesty is immoral; similarly killing folks is immoral and keeping them alive is moral. It cannot work the other way around, and thus there is objectivity, without that being the kind of law like gravity that one cannot defy.

I don't think i'm saying anything extraordinary or new here, so I wonder why it is so difficult to grasp. I'll try a quick recap.

1. Humans are heavily socially dependent on each other and have developed language as an aid to cooperation, including education planning and agreements.

2.Humans also make identifications of themselves as individuals, and this can give rise in thinking and planning to a conflict between self- interest and social interest.

3. This conflict manifests as the moral conflict, whereby one has to choose between self-interest and social interest. Because morality is a social judgement, acting in the social interest is moral and acting against it is immoral whenever there is a conflict.

4. Animals without language cannot articulate to themselves the nature of social interest or clearly differentiate it from self-interest, and therefore largely avoid such internal conflict. Here for example, we have the beginning of language, and the beginning of dishonesty.



The dishonesty has to be, as Attenborough says 'very occasionally', because otherwise the warning would not work either as a deception or as a warning. And I would add that it is clearly an intentional deception, and thus the original sin.