unenlightened has a theory about minds, that minds might all be part of a sea of minds to which they return. Can we similarly use our college science to say - that theory can't be true, brains don't work that way? — Isaac

You don't seem to know the difference between a theory and an analogy, which i used to try and make sense of what other people have been saying. So I'd prefer that you just leave me out of your discussions altogether.

I know what I said.

Whence the religious language? Angels? Soul? You are arguing with your fantasy of what I have been saying. So you can carry on without my input, or pretend you have made a meaningful contribution, or whatever.

You say 'talking meat', I prefer 'embodied mind'. It's not exactly controversial or even original.

But you've never seen a mind either, yet you infer their existence quite happily. I'd have thought even the butcher's slab was better evidence for the existence of brains than my post is for the existence of minds. — Isaac

Yes, and livers and kidneys too, I guess. Am I talking to a piece of meat here? Or why are we discussing meat in a thread about minds?

You can observe brains are embodied. — Isaac

No. I have never seen a brain, only models, and possibly a piece of meat on a butcher's slab that I failed to recognise. I see your posts, and I assume you speak your mind as I do. I converse with other embodied minds and interact with animal embodied minds.

Maybe it's a colander? — Isaac

Well yes, I suppose it is; my mind pours out here and drips onto your screen, to be absorbed by your mind, and vice versa. They call it 'social being'.

Why the cup? Why not just the great sea of minds? — Isaac

I cannot say why. But I observe, as a matter of fact, everywhere but the internet and the phone, that minds are always embodied. Without embodiment there would indeed be nothing but a sea of mind, - at least that is the suggestion (sea of mind, not sea of minds), but the separation of physical senses into these eyes and those eyes produces the appearance of separation as the virtual 'point of view' that is each of our separate identities, together with the illusion of its indivisibility.

A life, a brain, I suppose. and the mud is personality and identity.

I struggle to see what can be meant by the suggestion that mind is indivisible. Clearly @Bartricks' mind is completely separate from everyone else's and of a much finer construction; and each of our minds are divided from the others. The nearest I can get would be to say that mind is like water; each of us has their separate cup of water, some muddy and some salty and so on, but the separation is temporary, and somewhere is the Great Sea of Mind whence we all came and to which we all return.

Those that recall MarsMan, will be familiar with the idea of mind as a 'noncount noun', and in this way it makes sense to me that the mind of a mouse is complete as the mind of any human; big or small the cup is always filled with water and water is everywhere the same and in that sense indivisible.

If the mind is divisible, show me the pieces its divided into! — Agent Smith

I want to stop smoking.
I want a cigarette.

I don't want to live.
I am afraid to die.


Any other internal conflict, ie any cause of stress. Stress, physically, is nothing other than 2 or more opposing forces in stasis. Muscle tension opposes gravity to enable one to stand. Mental stress presupposes parts of the mind.

The rest of your post is Buddhist cliche. — Xtrix

Yeah, sure. I'm not a Buddhist, but you know best.

Is it absurd to prefer the anesthesia ? — Pie

Of course not. It is not absurd to kill yourself either; I simply point out that in choosing oblivion over pain, one is trying to escape something, not achieve or gain something. That is where the notion of 'preferring' is misleadingly positive. Desire and fear are both projections to the future, but with opposite signs. They both equally take one away from one's real (present) life and create the prison of self from which one is seeking to escape.

Are there states worse than death ? So that death is to be sought ? My position is yes. — Pie

What’s so awful about pain? Why is some pain worse than death? — Xtrix

The questions make no sense. Death is the ending of life, not a state. If life is filled with pain one wants pain to end. If the discussion is depressing one wants to end the discussion. The OP wants to escape from this - the present, not to achieve the goal of death. This happens when the mind is filled with the past, and projecting the past into the future as the continuation of the self. This projection of self into the future of years of mediocrity and meaningless routine and general discomfort, followed by the death one fears, is what fills and poisons the present, and thus himself is the prison in which he is confined. The desire to escape creates the very thing one seeks to escape from.

The solution is to face the fear, which is to face the present self which is nothing but this circle of thought going nowhere but round in a miserable circle, and in seeing that whole, there is a new thought and so a new life. That dies, and there is this. If one is every day new, then the thought of death will have no meaning to be either feared or desired. One has to escape the prison of thought to find the terrible beauty of life , that life and death are not separate.

If one lives as though it is good to inhale, but bad to exhale, one will not be happy for long.

So much for the views of the living. But now listen to the dead.

Just a little nervous from the fall, chaps.

No. You are trying to make reality fit your moral qualms, when it patently does not fit them. It is largely a gay plague unfortunately, and it would be a really good idea to offer smallpox jabs to gays and advise them to curtail their promiscuity and keep contact details until the wretched thing is eliminated. If life was fair there would be a child-molester and rapist plague, but life isn't fair, and only the religious have to think it is, with the obvious bigoted result of blaming the victim.

we have to demonstrate how transmission is facilitated by certain methods of coitus and that's precisely what we're in the dark about. — Agent Smith

No we don't because no we ain't. Vaginas are more resilient than arses and better lubricated. Arses tear and bleed during sex and this provides the gateway for transmissiion via the exchange of bodily fluids. The correlation is thus directly observed and the explanation is already well known.

It's unfortunate, but gay sex is medically more risky than straight sex, apart from the dread disease of pregnancy, for which there is no known legal cure.

I went to an Alternative Health Fair with a friend — Cuthbert

The only alternative I've found to health is sickness; and a pile of horseshit at £20 is pretty alternatively invigorating even at todays' prices. A fair that does what it says on the tinfoil hat.

I wonder if the tipping point they're talking about is where the loss of Antarctica's albedo effect causes positive feedback on warming. — Tate

I think they are not sure. There are several positive feedback mechanisms, and some negative ones. The albedo is one, and the loss of sea ice can also speed up glacier flow rate. But also, warming seas increase snowfall. The one they are least sure about is what happens as the ice edge moves back and the exposed edge gets thicker.

The nature of tipping points is that the only way to find them in practice is to tip them. That would not be a great policy, though, however interesting.

I imagine you have a mind. And you imagine I do. When you imagine that, what colour and size and texture do you imagine my mind to have? — Bartricks

Small and dark with a thick fibrous skin and many prickles, like a somewhat browned off horse-chestnut still in its outer covering.

The Drake passage opened 33.9 million years ago (the Eocene-Oligocene transition), severing Antarctica from South America. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current could then flow through it, isolating Antarctica from warm waters and triggering the formation of its huge ice sheets. — Tate

This seems to me to be fundamental to the relative coolness of our climate ever since. In the North, the ice sheets come and go, but the Antarctic has been much more stable. But things are changing.

Whichever model winds up being most accurate, Dutton says it’s important to understand that the Antarctic ice sheet has an intrinsic tipping point.

“And there’s a real possibility we’re very close to it,” she says. “And we need to do everything in our power to prevent that from happening.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/antarcticas-ice-could-cross-this-scary-threshold-within-40-years

Here are links from that article to a couple of papers available to the public.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03427-0.epdf?sharing_token=twBZA98km78OTx6AMy9W3dRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0O1wLV2jblnuB2ZPB-nrPqiYIGrpSsWrxM6Zs9mXF_ynlXr1wSaMYX_yu3g0MtdOLlXhPdfZT7AIzZxxZPZi3eUhpkHsGguFotFouKQ8B8w2uIC2vXVZ2u18y_S1IFK1j1eEHc3lS8clGR4m-3cQS-WfAfUH5RhB-WU5xv6HTwn7ITa6h-rNuY7QaoyU5Ywu48%3D&tracking_referrer=www.nationalgeographic.com

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03302-y.epdf?sharing_token=U2E-t2XStTtmBYyTQ7DPQdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NBHKcAC_lrDjYnFOA0lhyL19H0suFTY3jD1u_wNHSNLuEPeFiQcKfrHUjiWydOqBabgwjyVi_e3JBCqopJDL-a4vTPRx8BISM-mI4eZrD-0dOT6mF18jZFK6RISo8M7dkEgurfH5a6tZ2nrBje9JYKnkjGDKrByRsfxgfGndjjnH1Jgqhn5nmt93q5gR3_Hgw%3D&tracking_referrer=www.nationalgeographic.com

The question I wonder about is HOW much worse it has to get before more people realize what is going on. — dclements

I can tell you the answer, but you're not going to like it. People will starve, they will get on the train to the extermination camp, and they will die by the million still believing in their religion, their country, their government and its ideology, and still convinced that they themselves, or Johnny Foreigner are to blame.

Never heard of it before, but google tells me it's good. I'll look out for it.

That click bait article was referred to by the Wiki article.

I'll be using a range of articles from scientific publications. — Tate

Ah. Apologies; since you had just said that, I thought that it was one of your articles.

https://www.offshore-energy.biz/uk-firm-seeking-partner-for-one-of-north-seas-largest-undeveloped-oil-projects/?fbclid=IwAR3tAjU-fi-p8-zDTVlB7sZqbfLz0TmjVWPDWGLLFCLan4akymkY8oUrMDw

:death:

Next time I'll communicate better by wearing my bright white tennis shoes, my baseball cap, and my cargo shorts so they won't confuse me for being French. — Hanover

There is no way they would have thought you were French; that was them publicly humiliating you for having the temerity to be in France and not speak French. Next time go to Spain. It is of course sacrilege to bend a bagutte, or put it in a bag, but since it sounds like some supermarket and not a proper boulangerie, it wouldn't have been a real baguette anyway, and carrying a folded baguette about town would be a further humiliation akin to having the scarlet letter 'A' embroidered on your dress.

Your logic is valid but this premise makes it unsound. — Jamal

You can have a smaller or larger slice of the pie, but when it gets to half the pie and beyond, you basically have the pie, minus a slice or two. A slice has to have 2 cut sides and the slice between them.

What's a prosecco salad? — Benkei

I don't know, I'm only a peasant. I see you're familiar with lines of coke though.

salad with a dressing — Cuthbert

They're so weird aren't they. Not only do they insist on dressing for dinner, they have to have the dinner dress too.

We peasants need a high carb diet to do all the work. Obviously you white-collar folks will stick to your Prosecco salads and lines of coke and such.

At current melt rate the northern hemisphere won't have any permanent ice by 2040, 2050 at the latest. — Olivier5

"Sea ice" you should say; Greenland ice will take a little longer to melt, fortunately.

Firstly, the Wikipedia statement doesn't even make sense. Secondly, the cited articles don't support it. That Wikipedia article is going to be edited. — Tate

I'm all for editing articles, and I agree the sentence is wooly and inaccurate, and at the same time too precise about the future which remains open to an extent. But wiki is better than clickbait.

It seems only reasonable to consult the inventor about his invention.

... he would ask his servants to bring him slices of meat between two slices of bread, a habit well known among his gambling friends. Other people, according to this account, began to order "the same as Sandwich!", and thus the "sandwich" was born.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Montagu,_4th_Earl_of_Sandwich

Half a bun is not a slice of bread, and neither a frankfurter nor a burger is a slice of meat. Sandwiches are eaten by the aristocracy, and burgers, hot-dogs, chip butties, and doughnuts are peasant food.

Essences can be declared - what else is a patent?

Capital markets are getting wise to this stuff.

“We are seeing the limits to growth and housing affordability and the impacts of poor-quality decision making of where and how to build. We are paying the price for all that now.” — Olivier5

Capital markets are wise enough to build a facility and entice us with the promise of jobs to take out mortgages on places they know full well are going to become worthless and uninhabitable. "We" will be taught to think it our own folly and to trust the wisdom of the market. Again.

https://www.organicconsumers.org/sites/default/files/sowing-hunger-reaping-profits-report.pdf

This is a report on a computer model. — Tate

"Global Warming Good News: No More Ice Ages"

I cannot comment on the computer model, but my argument is that this is very very bad news, not good news.

If ice sheets and glaciers don't melt a bit in the summer, the ice accumulates and starts to advance—in past ice ages, sheets of ice covered all of Canada and most of the Northern United States.

I have already pointed out that Earth has been in a fluctuating ice period for 33 million years. A world without ice is going to be a totally unrecognisable place. Covering Northern Europe and Canada with ice would happen very slowly and would not disrupt the whole world to anything like the same extent.

https://channels.ft.com/en/rethink/how-to-feed-10bn-people-in-a-sustainable-way/?utm_source=FB&utm_medium=sustainability&utm_content=paid&fbclid=IwAR2As2XXpMDsFlIfkqxlI8sawuNqbU7HkFN5GlDAmhz5GczL1vav4D1Q9Ks

We cannot afford for you to eat meat at every meal any more.

To make it clearer, my reason for calling the time of the evolution of humans a period of stability is the Antarctic ice sheet which started developing 33.9 million years ago at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary and this is the 'icehouse period' that we are still in. But manmade global warming is likely to tip us out of the icehouse and into the hothouse which neither humans nor apes have ever experienced.

You are losing track of the relative time scales here. The history of humanity is a point on the geological timescale. We could be living right smack in the middle of one of those "wild fluctuations of climate" that you mentioned and not notice it. — SophistiCat

Perhaps I wasn't clear. The history of humanity spans roughly the Quaternary period, which consists of alternating glaciations and interglacials over the last 3 million years or so; the beginning of the stone age is a little further back into the Pliocene Epoch. That is what I call a period of stability relative to the much larger climate variations over geological time. Note that i call the mere covering of Northern Europe and Canada with an ice sheet benign stability in the context of major disruptive events.

You only just worked this out? — Banno

It has become more apparent as the working poor have lost their economic power, and the social welfare gains of the C20th are rolled back. But don't worry, it's all going to get much worse.

I am wasting my time there because it will only become possible for humanity to restrain themselves from disrupting their own environment to the point of self-extinction by reaching a much wider consensus than we currently have. To the already converted, there is not much to say except 'farewell'. Do you have anything more to say than criticising your allies?

The story so far.

We have solar cycles, about which not much is known over the long term, because the records cannot be read through the inferred influences of the atmosphere. We know that solar radiation varies with the eleven year sunspot cycle, and another 100 year cycle, and we infer from. We also know from astronomical study of main sequence stars, that the sun is getting hotter, by about 25% over 3billion years or so.

Insolation of Earth is further modified by Milankovitch cycles. These have periods of 26000, 41,000, and 100,000 yrs. The reason why the North polar region is the influential one for these cycles is that most of the land mass is in the Northern hemisphere and the land heats and cools more quickly than the sea, and ice forms more easily on land, because sea has salt as antifreeze. So the Antarctic is more stable.

The temperature of Earth's surface is produced by insolation modified by transparency and insulation effects of the atmosphere, and the reflectivity of the surface itself, and by the absorption of heat by photosynthesis. (Forests also have a large cooling influence through transpiration and associated cloud production.)

The lesson I take from the 2 billion yr old story of cyanobacteria poisoning the atmosphere with oxygen and producing a snowball Earth, which might have remained stable until the present because of the reflectivity of ice, but for some vulcanism restoring a bit of CO2 and maybe darkening the ice a bit with ash, is that the Gaia hypothesis is not true. The living planet is not self regulating.

Rather, there have been wild fluctuations of climate through geological time far larger than can be accounted for by variations of insolation. The history of humanity has been one of unusual climate stability sufficiently long for the effects of milankovitch cycles to become noticeable.

When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what was the greatest challenge for a statesman, he replied: 'Events, dear boy, events'.

Vulcanism, asteroids, continental drift, and changes to the biome. Human civilisation is a change to the biome that has affected every region and every species. It is events that destabilise the climate and send it careering off to a heating or cooling until it arrives at a new semi-stable climate maybe tens of degrees hotter or cooler. This happens because of positive feedback and tipping points, which complex systems analysts will be familiar with.

:rofl: Folks have been looking for a real world example ever since whichever pedant it was raised the 'grue' thing, and you have found it! My heartiest commiserations!