pretty sure I just heard some crabs (yes crabs) talking on a beach as i walked past them... — Changeling

Happens all the time, but the conversation is usually rather dull :

"Hey look what a big claw I've got!"
"Pah! Mine's bigger!"
"What the fuck is that? Looks like a walking coral, hope it's the vegetarian kind, or we're paste."

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" — Moliere

If {If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,} then we cannot possibly know whether or not lions can talk.

which can help one adaptively discern how to live. — 180 Proof

Sure it can. Rather too often though, it doesn't; hence the maladaptive policies being followed in the age of the triumph of science and the decline of religion.

It shows us how to think about science, maybe. So what?

Have you looked at the op's project? I would have thought we'd be about on the same side of rejecting it out of hand.

Neither can "religion", which has only ever told us how to tribally conform, servilely obey & scapegoat. — 180 Proof

That is telling us how to live. You may tell a different tale. I certainly do. Science is silent on the matter.

You cant love if you are dead! — universeness

You claim! But have heard the Grateful Dead.

Does an image, directly from science, such as 'pale blue dot,' not have any affect on your personal views on how you should live and does it not impact your view of how others should live? — universeness

Having an effect is one thing, but that dot cannot tell me whether to build more rockets or grow more beans. It can show me the dot, but not measure the beauty.

Science wins because the magic works. Making wine from grape juice works; making wine from water does not.

But notoriously, science cannot tell us how to live, only expand our options. Who you gonna call?

The book being promoted here attempts to make a religion of science, and necessarily fails. Just as one cannot fix a broken heart with a spanner, or even a scalpel. The right tool for that job is love, and the science of love is a disaster worse than any quackery, because you cannot have it, you cannot test it, you cannot repeat it, all you can do is kill it.

brains pre-date language — Moliere

Brain expands the repertoire of an organism's responses to the environment, particularly in cooperation with specialised organs of sense. One way a complex brain can do this is by modelling the result of various responses, in a virtual environment, and for this it can be useful to distinguish things - a chestnut tree from a monkey puzzle, for instance - (trees I can climb from trees I cannot climb).

Some brains get caught up in the modelling process to the extent that they lose the distinction between the model and reality. In particular, they mistake the 'I' of the model for the real organism. Such is the human condition and universal delusion.

↪unenlightened
Long, drawn-out fart noise. — frank

↪Tzeentch
Long, drawn out fart noise. — frank

Yes, Frank. Repetitive, rude, and yet in the end, meaningless.

People cannot work together without a boss wielding power is your position, and it is indefensible, because most people most of the time just do get on with things cooperatively. Languages actually thrive better without a boss. Science itself rejects the boss in favour of open and equal discourse. In the case of environmental degradation and global warming it is absolutely the bosses of industry and government who are refusing to act while people all around are calling for action and trying to do their bit, and this in the face of a massive propaganda campaign trying to minimise climate change and ridicule and delegitimise any protest or demand for change.

Here you go. Draw your own conclusions.

Why do you see this as a good thing? — frank

Why do you ask?

Has there ever been a national political figure who was universally accepted as a natural leader of Europe? — Olivier5

To Europe's great credit, there has not; neither Hitler not Jesus managed it. It has always found other ways to reach an approximate consensus - war, usually.

Why lie about who we are? Why become something we are not? — Shawn

On the practical side, there are obvious reasons why one might want to become fluent in French, or a qualified electrician, or a hit with the ladies. Such becoming capable takes time, but can be realised eventually -- or sometimes not.

But for a liar to become honest, for a violent man to become peaceful, for a selfish man to become unselfish, these things cannot be done with time, gradually. It takes a flash of insight, and there is an instant transformation, or there is not.

What tends to happen in self-observation is that one is divided into the observer and the observed, the critic or analyser and the criticised or analysed. Suppose for example I smoke, and I am wanting to be a non-smoker. The wannabe non-smoker looks critically at the smoker and demands an effort to stop. This can last up to three hours, until the smoker's desire to smoke reasserts itself. Because the wannabe non-smoker is actually the smoker - the one who wants to stop wants to continue. And so I go about saying "I'm trying to give up, but it's very hard.", and thinking that in time it will be easier, like speaking French. But insight is seeing without the separation, that one's desire to stop has always been imaginary to the extent that it has always been separated from one's desire to smoke. Once that conflict sees itself whole, it will be instantly resolved. If one wants not to do something, one simply stops and there is no difficulty, effort, or time involved. It takes a few days for the nicotine in the body to disperse, but stopping has already happened.

Spotting the conflict can be tricky: I want to be a concert pianist/rock and roll guitar-god, but I don't want to spend 10,000 hours training my eyes to read music and my hands to play it. That cannot be.

You OK there, Un? — Banno

That entirely depends on your neural network.

I prefer "stuff" to "matter", and I prefer "arrangement" to "pattern" because a pile of sand is matter arranged in no particular pattern, and light and X rays and such is something, but not quite matter to my mind. And when pressed, I will try to squeeze in "process" as a sequence of patterns.

As to the existence of patterns without matter as 'potential arrangements' or what have you, you can please yourselves as to their 'existence'. Certainly mathematics studies such beasts in the abstract, whether they exist or not.

If philosophy hobbyists can’t even get climate science right, they’re simply not worth the time. — Mikie

What else do you have planned before myopia extinguishes our species? It is rather sad, certainly that even amongst these intelligent friends, it is a struggle all the day long just to establish that there is something to be concerned about. Of course in relation to recent posts, one has to understand that Canada is one place that might become more hospitable to human life with Global warming. And that is the myopia once again, as if all the migrants from the tropics, the floodplains, the expanding deserts and ecological disaster zones won't be bothering all the nice Canadians at all.

I used to be interested in Ecosophy back in the day, but those were the days when philosophy departments in Universities were being defunded because they could not show the value of their product. Well you get what you pay for, I suppose. You pay peanuts, you get snake oil.

Anyway, the problem remains that even now, the only appeal that anyone can even understand is to naked self-interest. "Hey, we're all going to die. " Perhaps you and I are the stupid apes that cannot see that that must be a good thing for the poor planet, and the sooner the better.

So i don't see it helping with the mind-body problem or the hard problem, except perhaps to show how what we deal with is always already filtered through our neural networks, even when they are behaving unconventionally. — Banno

When did neural network become the foundation of reality, I think it must have been last night while I was asleep? I have less experience of neural networks than I have of brains, and I have only once tried to cook a pig's brain, and I regretted it. Neural networks sound stringy, and might therefore make quite good filters in principle Pig brains though would make a terrible filter - gelatinous rather than fibrous.

Poor old Sartre clearly had a bad trip, which usually arises from a resistance to the dissolution of self. Shame he had to make a philosophy out of it and impose it on us, though.

So neural networks engender visions of heaven and hell. and neural networks engender visions of neural networks that some people call filters of reality.

Heaven's net spreads wide.
Though its meshes are coarse,
Yet nothing slips through. — Lao Tzu

Whereas everything crashes through the net of hell, presumably.

How is a neural net to make a judgement here?

Which dictum you gonna believe? Is it even up to you? — Janus

One can make a decision only on the supposition that one can make a decision. If it's not up to me, or down to me, then there is no decision to be made, ever. I will be determined to sit here and piss-my pants, because I cannot decide to go to the toilet. I conclude that everyone who wills anything believes they can do so; one cannot write without choosing one's words, thus even Galen has to believe he has a choice to make that he can make and that hasn't already been made. This doesn't answer the free-will determinism question, of course, but I think it answers your question, universally. Everyone is pre-determined to believe in free-will by virtue of there being, as it were, 'forks in the road'. See also, The Diceman by Luke Rhinehart.

Psyche is disrupted by psychoactive substances, but never quite transcended. It seems to me that even a materialist or rationalist understanding can see theoretically that the sense of self is derived from the limitations of the senses; My boundaries are the eyes that I can see with, the body I can touch with and so on. I am not you because I cannot see through your eyes walk in your shoes, feel your pain and joy. Identity is thus a mere blindness and insensitivity, opposed to awareness. As if we were all flat-Earthers, we mistake the horizon for the end of the vital world

One lives one's normal life in service to that blindness, and makes awareness subservient to it. In this way one makes oneself absent from one's life, and projects oneself through time as nostalgia and fear/desire. It is thus only through the disruption of the discounted normality of awareness as self identity with drug induced sensory confusion, that one begins to become aware of reality at all. Otherwise, there is just a vague feeling of something missing, a loss of 'meaning'.
See also, The Bird of Paradise, by RD Laing. (Not seemingly available online for free).

I think I should really read Anti-Oedipus first, and I may start doing that, but I'll risk a brief description of my fantasies about the issues. Large pinches of salt all round.

I imagine sanity as mental wholeness, and that means the integration of emotion, imagination, reason, and so on.

I don't have to imagine, I clearly see society as a whole as profoundly sick, dangerously sick, addicted to violence against itself, detached from reality in all sorts of ways, behaving irrationally and incoherently, and talking nonsense.

It follows, I suppose, that the diagnosed schizophrenic manifests individually the whole of the fragmentation of society. To be sane is to be sensitive, and the sensitive among us have projected onto them, the repressed negativity of those around them, in the same way that any oppressed group does; whatever is unacceptable to me, I make that you. You are mad, because I cannot possibly be.

Here is a song about how to fit in to this fragmented society :

If it doesn't matter to you whether your views are true or not, then... but I don't believe that is the case at all. — unenlightened

I've changed my mind.

views about what is the case (information), as opposed to views about what ought to be the case (instructions, ideology), or sentiments about what is the case (emoting). — Isaac

You are of course entitled to your views about what is the case, and in particular about what ought to be the case and how you feel about these things. Is that not what we are doing here? Exchanging ideas about what is the case and what ought to be the case and how we feel about it? Please don't pretend that I am the ideologue here and you are the disinterested scientist. We are interrogating matters of fact and matters of morality together in this thread, and we assume - or at least I do - that our views are honestly held {held to be true, that is}, and open to interrogation and that we both hope that the truth will eventually prevail. And this despite your suggestion that speaking of truth is tiresome.

How ought we, as a society, deal with talk; should we regulate it at all, and if so, how? That is the topic isn't it? And I am not speaking on behalf of any kind of "ilk". I am speaking my best understanding of the problems we have in society, and how we might improve society. Don't misrepresent me as some totalitarian propagandist, please. I am an old fart long retired conversing with other thinkers on an obscure website, not an agent of the devil. I don't claim a monopoly on the truth, nor do I think that anyone else has one; I claim that we ought to care about it, and if we don't care about it and try to conserve and preserve it, it will not flourish. And that would be of great cost to society.

So I am wondering what it is that you disagree with, exactly? I does not help very much to retreat from truth to views, it does not exempt you from supporting your views in debate or make them more real or honest, let alone believable. These are my views, and they are what I think is true. If it doesn't matter to you whether your views are true or not, then... but I don't believe that is the case at all.

It has nothing to do with 'information' or unenlightened's tiresome invocation of truth. It's to do with restraining one's speech to get along with others. And, yes, some people do seem to need a little nudge in that direction sometimes.

What's new is the attempt to control the dissemination of actual information by hooking it on these already existing social rules and then pretending (as you do here) that they're one and the same thing and things have always been that way. — Isaac

When you say "actual information", it starts to sound like you mean things that are true, rather than things that are false. How tiresome of you!

Some stuff about population movements and demographics, death rates and concentration camps. Don't expect much pro Putin stuff, or even much lets negotiate stuff. But interesting nonetheless.

Also, they're taking the Hobbits to Isengard.

1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are. — Sargon

This is problematic. The argument declares for determinism in the first premise, and then discovers it at the end as if it has proved it. But of course the cause of my actions is my imagination. I imagine the pleasant taste of beer and that might cause me to head to the fridge, or I might catch sight of my burgeoning beer-gut and think again. The causal path of thought cannot be predicted even if it is mechanical because of the halting problem. So the question is begged as it always must be.

But the argument is further disguised by talk of "ultimate responsibility" as if it is something deeper than ordinary responsibility. Which it clearly isn't. I choose to drink beer and then I am drunk, and I am responsible for the way I am - drunk. And if I get in a fight or run someone down, I am responsible for that because I am responsible for the way I am. And of course the law recognises that one attains an age of responsibility, one is not born with it, but develops the capacity to change one's state. It also recognises diminished responsibility, when circumstances are overwhelming. There is a lot of work being done by that weasel word, 'ultimate', that it has no permit for.

The freedom to say anything, like the freedom to pass gas or salivate, is a condition of life, something that we do by virtue of being a human. — NOS4A2

Tape worms are a condition of life; one to be avoided. Lies are likewise parasitic on truthful communication and likewise weaken it, by destroying trust. Trust is the very fabric of society, the foundation of the economy, of investment, and of trade. The thesis of Gibbon's Decline and Fall is that the collapse of the Roman Empire was first and foremost a moral collapse. I think we are heading for a second dark age, and for the same reason.

But the magic doesn't work because no matter how many times you repeat the word, the U.S. (for example) is still not N. Korea, Nazi Germany, or Stalinist Russia. — The Baden

That's a rather low bar you're setting, and one that fabulous wealth does much to lift a country over, even if the trickle down doesn't lift all boats.

Learn the language.

I think it indicates that the American population is traumatised and self-medicating with anything it can get to reduce the pain and get through the day. It is at best misleading to call that 'hedonism'.

They are taught that if they are not rich, beautiful and happy they are themselves to blame, and the weight of guilt they are made to feel for the structural inequality of society, which adds to the trauma of an isolating uncaring community rife with desperate poverty, homelessness and violence set amongst images of fabulous wealth and beauty unavailable to them.

But I wouldn't know really, I've never been there and never will.

We personify the sun as Sol, and the dog as Rover, the sea as Neptune, wisdom as Sophia ... It would be better to turn the question around and ask why we have started to depersonalise our world. It is the depersonalisation that leads to these absurd questions as to what or who exists or fails to exist. Can you believe that there are people who study philosophy, yet deny the existence of Sophia, who they profess to love? You have to laugh.

He is known by two names, both "Santa Claus" and "St. Nicholas". — Shawn

Also "Father Christmas". But he is an archetype, not a person.

Does justice exist?
Is life fair?

Life is patently not fair, and in the sense that justice does not prevail, it does not exist. It exists though, to that small extent that we live justly.

St Nicholas, according to the myth is related to good King Wenceslas; power employed to the benefit of the powerless. This is the non-existent truth behind the multi-billion dollar industry of Santa Claus. If you are looking for the real Santa Claus, you will find him at the homeless centre, treading down the snow, and delivering a little warmth to those with nothing, not just at Christmas, but every day - everyone knows that. Santa Claus is an idea you can live by, not an old man creeping about in children's bedrooms.

So you might be able to decipher that I am a poster on a philosophy forum, and yet not know what I had for breakfast this morning.

Smart dude, Kant, I can find no fault with his position.

There's a direct contradiction. You're advocating for both censorship by institutions controlling public discourse and the ability to freely call out, via public discourse, corruption in those institutions. That's a direct contradiction. You clearly cannot have both. — Isaac

I am advocating an absolute defence in law for the right to tell the truth. If you speak the truth I defend your right to free speech. But you don't speak the truth, you lie about what I have said to my face. That I condemn. No censorship of the truth, no penalising of anyone who speaks the truth, Penalties for liars like you. It really isn't that complicated. I advocate censuring and censoring lies and liars. I clearly cannot have either, let alone both, in a corrupt world, but I continue to demand the impossible because it is what we ought to aim for as a society.

But you are totally full of shit in everything you say because you know full well what unmoderated freedom on the internet results in, and you choose to pontificate and argue here precisely because the moderation actually increases the freedom and does not diminish it.

But you're arguing in favour of removing the means by which we could call it out. That seems contradictory. — Isaac

If you think your call out on twitter will change the judiciary or any other thing, then you are sadly deluded. If twitter even had a reputation for honesty, it would help. There is no contradiction in what I say, what is important is the truth, and I defend your right to tell the truth as best as my impotence allows. In the current situation where the truth has already been devalued and corruption is not merely allowed but actively lauded and supported, there is nothing much to be done, but I am still doing my bit to advocate for the truth. And you cry contradiction which is not true. For shame!

So explain how this would work. I write "the judiciary are all corrupt and accept bribes" on Twatter and it gets flagged as 'lies', but it's alright because unenlightened's brilliant scheme defends my right to speak the truth. Now. Who's going to check whether what I've said about the corrupt judiciary is true...? — Isaac

If the judges are corrupt as a whole, there is no solution. If everyone lies all the time, there is no discernible truth. If you are telling the truth we are fucked. Probably, you are, and we are. So then it is time for a revolution, or the collapse of civilisation until folk start to value truth again. The only answer to corruption is to call it out and end it.

Posterity tends to work out the truth even after efforts to censor it occurs. — NOS4A2

Freedom of speech is the only context in which proper trial and error can occur, and truth can finally work itself out. — NOS4A2

The story you tell is rather inconsistent; limitations on the freedom of speech are always limitations on speaking the truth in the interests of lies and deception, yet somehow the truth escapes eventually.

That certainly happens and needs to be prevented as far as possible. The means to do this is an absolute defence in law of the right to speak the truth, not the right to tell lies. such a defence could apply to wiki-leaks, to any whistle-blower, to cases of libel and slander, and so on. But this is not what America stands for, or you defend, or people here seem to support.

This becomes important with the supposed democratisation of speech by the internet, which turns out to be no such thing. What we got is the freedom to say anything, and the bombardment of lies and bullshit to the extent that no one can trust anything that is said. Thus communication of the truth has been reduced, not increased, and particularly in America, ordinary people are more bamboozled with complete nonsense than ever.

Now there is no infallible recipe from distinguishing truth from falsehood, as has been indirectly pointed out to me here. However, society relies on truth for every function, and must defend it or collapse. So we have law, that seeks the truth when it is disputed, and tries to make the distinction case by case.

We have fire alarms to warn us if there is a fire in the building, and if someone sets the alarm off for fun, or to get a break from work, they deserve censure for their dangerous deception that undermines the functioning of the alarm system. There is and should be no right to call fire when there is no fire.

There will always be people trying to deceive for personal gain or for a cause, and there will always be people deceived, and honestly spreading falsehoods. Perhaps everyone does their bit. But the inevitability of failure is the mark of every ideal, and no reason at all to abandon it. Defend the right to speak the truth, but defend also the right to hear it, which means to not have the truth drowned out by lies and bullshit.

So you are saying - that my talking about the importance of truth is irrelevant, because neither side values the truth?
— unenlightened

No. I'm saying you talking about truth is irrelevant because the issue - social media censorship - is not about truth. It's opinion that's being censored. The issue is about power, not truth. — Isaac

And you are wrong. But there is no problem with you expressing your opinion on any media. You have lost the truth as even a concept, and been reduced to mere opinion, and you cannot even see the importance. What a shame!

Neither side value truth. — Isaac

So you are saying - that my talking about the importance of truth is irrelevant, because neither side values the truth? You are complaining because I have not chosen which lie I prefer?

This is literally unbelievable.

The truth cannot be established here (insufficient data) and censorship is, in any case, completely unrelated to truth but rather is being used to further various political ends. — Isaac

Truth cannot be established, because it has historically not been sufficiently valued, has not been protected, and rewarded, but has been betrayed and actively persecuted. And that is why I am troubling to make truth the centre of my interventions here. The philosophy of freedom without qualification which I rather suspect you are still promoting, is the political philosophy that has produced a society in which lies flow so freely that the truth cannot be discerned.

America has valued freedom above truth, and is paying the price. Unfortunately, they have also exported their distorted values around the world. And if you cannot see the connection with the topic, I cannot think how to explain it to you any clearer.

What I didn't understand was how it was unnecessary. Emotions are part of who we are.
We are not necessarily 'attached' to hope or fear. Perhaps it is a fear or anxiety related to a potential consequence (success/failure) of entertaining hope that causes some to deny they have any. — Amity

I just came across this, that says more clearly what I was failing to say very well:

A mind that is indifferent, is aware of the shoddiness of our civilization, the shoddiness of our thought, the ugly relationships; it is aware of the street, of the beauty of a tree, or of a lovely face, a smile; and it neither denies it nor accepts it, but merely observes - not intellectually, not coldly, but with that warm affectionate indifference. Observation is not detachment, because there is no attachment. It is only when the mind is attached - to your house, to the family, to some job - , that you talk about detachment. But, you know, when you are indifferent, there is a sweetness to it, there is a perfume to it, there is a quality of tremendous energy - this may not be the meaning of that word in the dictionary. One has to be indifferent - to health, to loneliness, to what people say or do not say; indifferent whether you succeed or do not succeed; indifferent to authority.

Now, if you observe, you hear somebody is shooting, making a lot of noise with a gun. You can very easily get used to it; probably you have already got used to it, and you turn a deaf ear - that is not indifference. Indifference comes into being when you listen to that noise with no resistance, go with that noise, ride on that noise infinitely. Then that noise does not affect you, does not pervert you, does not make you indifferent. Then you listen to every noise in the world - the noise of your children, of your wife, of the birds, the noise of the chatter the politicians make - , you listen to it completely with indifference and therefore with understanding. — J.Krishnamurti

Public Talk 6 Bombay (Mumbai), India - 07 March 1962