He strikes me as the person of other people's envy, and the envied person. — baker

The utter irrelevance of other people, envious or pitying is the essence of Narcissus. Self -concern and self-love, writ large, would be envied by those with equal self-concern, but without self-love. Self-harmers, anorexics, for examples - another form of addiction.

Why do you gain greater comfort in divine halfassery? — Hanover

Man created god in his own image?

Narcissus is the archetype of the addict.
Echo of the unthinking enthusiast for whatever propaganda, religious, commercial or political, happens to be the loudest.

Who promoted God to beyond His competence?

The Peter principle applies to hierarchical structures; but not a statue, nor a painting ever gets promoted to the job of artist. It makes no sense to suggest it, and that is God's relation to His creation and to all other creatures.

What about memetics and the principles behind MEME success? Such memes of today's techno-culture have very little utility, wouldn't you agree? — Josh Alfred

I would certainly like to agree, but there is a problem: propaganda, deception, misrepresentation, manipulation, are uses. You cannot avoid in human affairs the moral dimension, so before you can calculate, you need to distinguish use from abuse. Language is a social good , and has social and antisocial uses. The bank clerk and the bankroller use the same language, and likewise the philosopher and the meme artist.

But I will offer one principle that might help a little or make your project impossible. I seems clear to me that the abuse of language is destructive of meaning, because meaning relies on trust. If one cannot believe anything a politician says, (or a husband) their communication becomes meaningless and thus useless, as described by Aesop's fable of The Boy who Cried 'Wolf'. Thus dishonesty destroys trust and so destroys meaning. The use of a word is therefore dependent on a social context; the more we can trust each other's honesty, the more use we can make of our language.

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion. — Robert Graves

I'd say Graves' "The White Goddess" gives a fairly thorough philosophy of poetry from metaphysics to politics.

Personally, my instinct was always to be harder on mean than on stupid; but there is a volume of anything that becomes spam, the same way that series 4 of anything becomes Neighbours.

If that's true, then we're addicted to mystery, because without it, we slip into dementia. — frank

That would explain the ubiquity of puzzles. I believe mental stimulation is recommended...

That works too, but it's less present to hand.

By looking. — Prishon

More so by communicating via the internet: bouncing the signal my words are transformed into around the world and collecting them into an equivalent image on your screen to the one on mine, to be confirmed by your making a sensible reply. Your looking on its own or my looking on its own might be a phantasm, but our communication cannot be. the pattern is demonstrated to be preserved in the invisible world.

Science is true because the magic works.

Elsewhere, god be thanked!

7.5k
that is what I would like to explore.
— unenlightened
With ... — tim wood

With other people, not you.

11.3k
How does pattern recognition happen?
— unenlightened

Perception & Memory

1. Perceive A, parts & whole. Record in memory

2. Perceive B, parts & whole. Cross-check perception of A with memory of A. Match! Pattern. No match! No pattern. — TheMadFool

But you left out the rest of the question.

How does the immune system recognise the breakdown products of cell death? How does a computer learn to play Go, and come up with a strategy that had not been known to humans? — unenlightened

Are you saying that computers and enzymes have perceptions and memories?

Btw, I'm still not clear on the thesis we're all ignoring — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not clear either, but it is to do with this; that pattern recognition can be a human faculty or an enzyme's capacity. That it can be learned or it can be a way of learning. That it is intuitive, or it is a calculation. I may be wrong, and it can be that there is only an analogical connection between the various usages - that is what I would like to explore.

I'm tempted to suggest that you are imposing your own pattern on things here, but the children would get over-excited. :wink: I'm just reminding folks that there is a topic here, and it's not one of the far too many many Kant threads.

But let's get back on topic. How does pattern recognition happen? How does the immune system recognise the breakdown products of cell death? How does a computer learn to play Go, and come up with a strategy that had not been known to humans?

Given that order is a relation between two things, what sense does it make to say order is intrinsic to two things, one of which is not an observer sufficiently intelligent enough to estimate it? It follows that it makes no difference whatsoever, and is therefore utterly meaningless, for there to be patterns as an intrinsic condition of the empirical domain, if there is no intelligence to which the pattern is comprehensible. — Mww

A row is a relation between ducks, just as a beach is a relation between pebbles. They do not require the say so of a philosopher. But if, as you claim there is no relation between the post that I type, and the post that you read, then there is no possibility of any communication. Unless the pattern is maintained from my keyboard through many causal transformations to your screen, we are not even discussing. Irony of ironies, all is irony.

The earth turns — tim wood

What are these turns made of?

as a practical matter, rows make sense; a lot of things make sense. But but does not mean they exist out there — tim wood

So what does it mean? But alas, I am banging my fingers on these keys in what I think is a meaningful pattern and you discern nothing of it, but impose your own meaning. Ain't no use to talk to you.

What is it (usually) made of? — tim wood

Yawn. The presumption behind this question is that substance is the only real. But take an example "some ducks in a row". And you doubt that this row is real and ask me what are rows usually made of. So I reply, "usually they are made of fence posts, but in this case, it is made of ducks." Does that answer your question?

Edit. What are footprints made of? they are made by feet in the pattern of a foot, and they are made of mud, sand, clay sometimes fossilised and hardened over millions of years. And they are as real as anything.

Alas yes, practice does not conform to my theory, but that is exactly where I wanted to get to. One recognises a pattern, and another pattern, and one would like to find the overarching pattern of patterns, but they conflict, and philosophy is born of the conflict

the noise within the signal in the noise — 180 Proof

If I sort some pebbles by size, and put big ones here and little ones there I am imposing a pattern. However, the pebbles on Chesil Beach have had a pattern imposed on them by waves and tides.
Pebbles are not abstractions, are they?.

the question as to what a pattern is — tim wood

A pattern is an ordered structure. stuff has structure and the structure is real as is stuff.

The patterns of petals on flowers tend to conform to the Fibonacci series. This is the mathematics of gene expression, not of human brains. In the limit. Pattern in information equates to compressibility.

Pattern, then, a capacity to associate perception with memory and recognize similarities. — tim wood

No. "Recognition" is the term that denotes the mental aspect. You are muddying the waters. You define pattern as the ability to recognise similarities and that implies that pattern recognition is the capacity to recognise the capacity to to recognise similarities. Ugh!

I think that's all horseshit. — Srap Tasmaner

And so do I.

... due to the bubble they live in, they start to believe their mantras. — ssu

As do we all. (he recites)

Yet the Soviet Union collapsed, Communist China didn't, but prospered. — ssu

This is true, but I think it is more to do with the deep culture of China, I suspect, than anything else. They got a lot more history and politics than we do, and rather less of an obsession with individualism, such that communism makes more visceral sense.

The general focus of this thread, perhaps, is the tension between what it means for religion to be just another language community and religion as a locus for the discussion of things of ultimate concern. — Ennui Elucidator

You'll find a deal of sympathy here for the notion that religion is all talk; but I would suggest that it is primarily a social (and occasionally unsocial) practice in the first place. In the good old days, the rituals of the Catholic Church were conducted in Latin, and incomprehensible to almost all the congregation -Kyrie Eleison and all that. But we peasants were illiterate even in our own tongue. We went through the motions with more or less devotion, and meaning was a very vague and fairly unimportant aspect.

Except that the CCP think of themselves as true Marxists. — ssu

Those who say so don't simply understand their own silly hubris. — ssu

A little harsh. There are words that politicians like to claim, that one does not have to agree that they deserve. "Democratic" is claimed by many a totalitarian dictator. but the rhetoric does not create the fact. When democracy is "adapted" to the need to keep a person in power, it stops being democracy. And Marxism too can be adapted out of existence to meet the need for development and enterprise.

Rather than try and arrive at a particular answer or series of answers, which would be at best misleading, I tend to have recourse to a crib sheet, aka a philosophical dictionary.

Here's one that gives you a down and dirty resume of major philosophers and important technical terms. Different philosophers and different historical periods use some terms differently, but if there is no entry for example for 'ground' it indicates that the term is probably informal and vague, thus - ground: something to rest your case on, especially when tired of carrying it.

It's a joke, but the joke is that it makes exactly as much sense as the analogy of the selfish gene.

Those of us who can remember their early childhood, remember being helpless. The typical family is not run as a market, because infants have nothing to sell but their full diapers, and are dependent on the government (aka parents) for their survival. The family is more communist than capitalist in its internal relations; from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. It simply would not work if the newcomers to the family had to earn their keep from the beginning.

Family, tribe, nation, the idea of loyalty and mutuality is widened, and it is only with "others" that one begins to trade and thus invent 'the market'. the market is a way of dealing with folk one does not care about.

Genes are entirely selfless, as Dorkins himself admits in the odd moment of sanity. (they lack the awareness requisite for selfishness) One might just as well suggest that the aim of all genes is to go extinct, and most of them manage it sooner or later, but the unlucky few survive and replicate for a few million years.

It's a curious story. If you read The Mass Psychology of Fascism, or his discussion of body armour, whereby trauma is stored in the body as tension and deformation and can be released by massage, he sounds insightful and quite modern in highlighting the connection of psyche on the one side to the social, and on the other to the body.

Other aspects of his career do seem more like a cult leader with paranoid schizophrenia. If any one wanted to, and more than a couple have, it is not difficult to replicate his experiments with orgone energy, but his results are more difficult to replicate, and so I am very sceptical ...

He was badly treated because he was a sexual liberal, anti-authority, communist, and loud-mouthed trouble-maker. But also a genius, and still worth reading for his psychological insights.

Gut feeling — Prishon

Yeah, "I feel that ..." is a common locution. But in the context of a discussion that is distinguishing feeling from reason, it's a cop-out and confusion. So you ought to distinguish the gut feeling of confidence, approval, happiness, or whatever it is, from the fact that the feeling is about.

It gives weak future offspring. — Prishon

"It" what? Evidence? Reasoning? Any justification or support at all?

Why is wanting to go to the disco selfish, and wanting to participate in public life (even though you're afraid that getting coughed on kills you) isn't? — Tzeentch

I've no idea. I didn't think that was the case. Do you have a problem distinguishing selfish and unselfish?

But what about them preffering going to a disco? What if that emotion is considered? Is it worse, because selfish? Is being selfish bad? — Prishon

Can we say that it is myopic? Perspective is what makes things that are close seem bigger than those that are far away; folly, is thinking it is really so. Selfishness presumes it is so. Selfishness is folly.

Trouble is though... — Isaac

There is indeed a deal of trouble - the troubled feelings are widespread.

People have the wrong emotions, obviously. 'Wrong' rationally, that is. I call it "irrational self-interest" My granny is more important than your Granny; indeed my night out is more important than your granny. But if rationality thinks it has a handle on something other than what people feel is important - something objective and rational then it is mistaken. One might feel that child deaths are more important than granny deaths, but try telling Granny that! One might have recourse to abstractions like 'equality' and 'justice', but the privileged tend to have recourse more to 'freedom'. if there were some arbitration available, or some god...

Emotion = giving a fuck.

So policy is based on whether, on aggregate, we give more of a fuck about Granny staying alive, or going to the disco.

And other emotional considerations.

Communism is not reached for in China. — Prishon

Yes, so stop calling it "communist China" and all your problems are solved. Just call it Goddam China or something.

Why is the country called communist? — Prishon

It isn't. But whatever it is called (by foreigners) and whatever song is sung, does not make it one thing and not another. Where I live is called the United Kingdom, but it has a queen not a king, and is rather disunited. So it goes.

There is no such place. The Republic of China/ Peoples' Republic of China is a State regulated capitalist market. Like The US, but without the veneer of democracy.

When I can do what I want to do, I'm all in favour of freedom. But when you are doing what you want to do and it's ruining my vegetable patch, your freedom has become vicious. I'm starving, and you are to blame. One might expect socialists to be better at maintaining the common good of a stable climate, but I see little evidence. It seems that the greed is everywhere. As covid demonstrates, my holiday is more important than your health.

Guns are an equalizer to might makes right. — NOS4A2

Lack of fear works just as well. Guns are only any good for killing and killing is only any good for instilling fear. Therefore, fear not and stay free.