Is telos in the kind of examples given facing the same direction as cause because it starts in your mind and crytallises or concretises later.

You may be intuiting the examples you said you wouldn't cite: the late S J Gould believed that at after a time of maximum mutations the form of many of which contained apparently useless features, after a contingent elimination episode had occurred some of the later surviving species found some of their features contingently matched the new environment they had to survive in. However if we were pious in an old fashioned way we could also add that this chain of events was in the mind of "god" beforehand, to be allowed to occur.

I think that what and who is, calls us to respect it / them as an end in it/themself-ves and not a means (of exploitation) to us only: my own original version of ought from is.

Physicists Shannon and Wheeler and linguist Halliday 1 are said to have suspected matter is a special case of meaning (this is very Peircian 2 too). I believe the meaning of what is, is "Is" (we are on an existence wave, hence our propensity * to be more than not be).

I've just spotted wave and weave are related in etymology. Jung is quoted as saying (roughly) that what we don't handle consciously, comes back to trouble us as destiny. Shopping done right doesn't haunt our destiny?

Lots of nice layers, it's your choice how to systematise your themes unconfusingly. I'm planning some articles myself, of this very sort!

{ * Propensity is a nice Popper word, occurring in The self and its brain }

1 Explained properly in 'On matter and meaning' in Halliday in the 21 st century ed Jonathan J Webster, Bloomsbury, 2013; I'm probably putting it too briefly

2 Peirce and pragmatism by W B Gallie, Dover, 1966

If the actual picture in Gen ch 1 verses 2 to end, is as far back as they could remember (perhaps after the Sunda Sea got formed after the Ice Ages - see Stephen Oppenheimer's Eden In The East, in which he parses the contents of Frazer's Golden Bough * and also Ryan and Pitman wrote a book they titled Noah's Flood about the Black Sea) and Adam and Eve the first people that could be remembered (nearer our time than mtEve and YAdam), then it is neither the creation time itself nor evolution that is delineated in these verses. But the meaning that had to be attached for teaching was about the first actual creation. Hebrew and Aramaic being a bit hyperbolic, the way a frugal mother "whips up a meal out of nothing", and bearing in mind hypotheses that even vacuums contain a little "something", and that we seem to be on an existence wave of sorts, allowing for long standing intuition or earlier research, "ex nihilo" begins to make a sort of sense.

In the exile the Judaeans met up with some Israelites who had been there longer who may have helped with slight editings. It may have been they that introduced the "rib" trope whose origin is a play: rib in Sumerian is the same as She who bears lives in Hebrew, hence it got overtranslated, perhaps as a mnemonic. I am convinced the Hebrews first had about four written books at Joshua's time, but these would only be used by senior trainers as a check and they would train declaimers / bards in reciting as in many semi-literate societies to this day (including those who are fully literate in secular affairs).

I've mentioned the origin of the visible elements of trext, I've mentioned meaning (the current fundamentalists deny Scripture has meaning which is why they don't teach any meaning) as creation (or beginning of this particular existence wave), but there is a deeper spiritual meaning for relating with "god", the spiritual side. Then there was also the usage in communal ceremonial remembrances.

{ * The details of the (up to) three inundations are sufficiently different in the versions of each nation. }

"Irrelevant!"
(Really, how does this statement relate to anything else in here? Who has said anything about mathematics?) — Alkis Piskas

Because maths is orderly - until you get the deranged teacher :cry: :fear: :scream: :worry: :groan:

The fabric of the universe is analogies all the way down.
They aren't necessarily / probably aren't identical; they are in an analogous position. You don't have further information to tell them apart. A lot of the puzzles of Raymond Smullyan leave us at that point:

http://www.logic-books.info/sites/default/files/lady-or-the-tiger-and-other-logic-puzzles.pdf

is a link given on another thread and here is part of my comment on that:

I like:
- that many of the answers will remain incomplete or even almost completely unknown, due to too few clues
- that you often have to change the sequence in which you attend to issues, and not deal with them in the order someone told you to

On a related note I find serendipity very provident: ideas and good books or articles seem to come looking for me.

Serendipity = serenity dip.

America and Europe seem to be on a warpath with Russia whilst at the same time leaving many weak spots exposed and allowing China, Turkey, and Pakistan to exert too much influence to the point that the situation is becoming dangerous — Apollodorus

It was irrational of Britain in the 1850s not to stay neutral, let Russia try to fend off France while perhaps learning a small lesson about whatever that was about, not bolster Turkey (which would have genuinely benefitted from modernising then and not in the 1920s). Instead Russia got so weakened it had to sell off Alaska where Russians had been more humane than their successors became, receiving only enough money to pay landlords / nobility and nothing left over for the serfs, who fell to the agitators. Neglecting Germany and Austria into the bargain and look what happened there.

Even the Hebrew Bible shows it doesn't — 180 Proof

Jeremiah's point exactly - worsening oppressions right in the middle of Josiah's "Make Judah Great Again" campaign. Josiah who was so out of it he miscalculated and got shot when he needn't.

It has "evolved", that's why I don't claim to be one by their newfangled definition. Also, what is grouped as evolution has changed (and most "evolution-ists" are uneasy with that).

how it’s okay for morality to be subjective — Franz Liszt

The subjective is the route how the objective comes to us. In the anthropic principle, what is out there and what is in our heads exist at the same time.

I know that your last question isn't for me and I'm not trying to stop him answering it. Nearly all opponents these days were influenced partly by the apologetists (whose sole real argument effectively boils down to an argument from nuisance social phenomenon), who weren't there in my young day. Combining religion and morals in one question to reason about is far from uninteresting (which is why I'm coolly joining in), but I sense that your existential need and the binary position opponents have been subjected to by the agitators * make it more logical to highlight (give greater prominence to) the logic angle. Why don't you extend Epicurus' advice and not only don't revolve yourself unnecessarily around gods (you'll pick up your own sense of this) but not around their opponents either. Agnosticism satisfies the conditions both of belief, and of non-belief. I made several further suggestions, what did you think of them? (Sorry if my "stream of consciousness" looked like spam! :wink: )

As for the history of good and evil in societies across periods of time, they just wax and wane, sometimes religion was in it one way, sometimes the other way, sometimes not at all.

{ * who were doing it to make tens of millions in money }

Maybe there are other forms of logic we can benefit from — TiredThinker

Make logic accessible in schools, and actually follow and implement it. Authorities are going backwards in their standard. You and I have less power. Challenge your local educators to find the sense in Cassirer, Gilson, Jevons and share it with the young.

The Frankensteinistic concoction you have almost made me throw up by describing, will be no use because it will be ill.

Projected back into our world — TheMadFool

I get this now. I guess I didn't know (as a youngster) I had to restrict myself to being Euclidian. There was no harm in the syllabus (then) and no harm in our doing things that weren't on it either.

Indeed, the apologetists haven't shown you whether the resurrection is relevant. I include it in my range of "relative". But what would you base morals on - would you base them on logic?

The fact that this has been presented thus by apologetists hasn't helped anyone's morals. The bad effects of ambition to apologetism strengthen my argument that Dimosthenes9 should go the logic route.
Didn't you see my responses and what did you think of them? I tried to cover the original ground.

It's that British and American politicians went in there making promises they had no intention of keeping and they expect UK and US troops and public to trust them?

I note Trump's text (which is no excuse for Biden or the UK). Trump went to Fordham.

I like:
- that many of the answers will remain incomplete or even almost completely unknown, due to too few clues
- that you often have to change the sequence in which you attend to issues, and not deal with them in the order someone told you to (I think I'll suggest that on the theism thread)
- the sentiments in the epilogue

All I'm saying is that God and religions offer a "moral" base which is still necessary to societies ... Just many atheists turn into bulls when they hear anything about "God and religions" and accuse them for every human harm that show up throughout history. I have met many of them in my real life so their stubbornness doesn't surprise me. It's the new trend to be Atheist nowadays and just make fun and accuse others who believe. — dimosthenis9

Rabble rousers have been setting up gullible unthinking "believers" with simplistic caricatures of "belief". I've followed this for two thirds of a century, and researched about the period before. Just sidestep all the bad manoeuvres on all sides. As for anomials, if you can't ignore them (for example if they are brazenly making an excuse for stealing) challenge them regarding stealing, in public so that others will understand. Morale-supporting morals are public property and don't belong to eccentric ghetto dwellers and their proselytisers. Encourage your peers to become honest agnostics.

Texts deliberately made semi-nonsensical are only authoritative in combination with accompanying teaching of meanings, and if that doesn't deserve our freely discerning respect we shouldn't give our loyalty.

Miracles are only ever relative, and have been far overblown: the recent apologetists have misled the public on this point among others.

My only long guess is Logic. That vast majority of people worldwide reach to a high average intellectual level, as to think Logically and realize that acting "good" when you live in a society is firstly for your own benefit!

But first I doubt that vast majority of people will ever come to that level and second even if they do, thinking Logically maybe isn't enough at the end at all for convincing someone to be "good". — dimosthenis9

I find it fascinating to ponder the many usages of the term "square":

- in logic - "it squares" (is consistent)
- in aesthetics - geometry, which assists calculations and illustrates relationships
- in epistemology - stemming from the above, and consistency again
- in ethics of relationships, "have you squared it with the boss" and such like.

Imposing zero sum terms is bad interhuman arithmetic.

The opposite of a right is a wrong. Do they realise that, when something is stolen from them?

Sociology of religion often finds itself cataloguing one or more tribes of not harmless enough eccentrics who claim that morality is "what we do" and take a dim view of everybody that doesn't want to belong to them.

I think that if Dimosthenes9 decouples and unlinks religion from morality, and vice versa, he can hope that people will look for morals that boost morale from all wholesome sources no matter what the badge or the brand name.

180 Proof and Dimosthenes seem agreed that religious sources get misused for bad. Taking several steps back I note the etymology of "god" is in "to which or whom a libation is poured", "bhaga" or "bog" "to which or whom offering is made" (cognate with "beg" ask an offering, "bag" container to bring an offering, "big" generous enough for an offering), "dieu" and "diable" share a root meaning some big sort of spirit, "theos" is law giver.

To the old Greeks law giving was about the basis on which natural phenomena would settle down between periods of upset. Some extended that to mores but only in the sense that they saw themselves as part of the world. Their relationship with that god or with the gods plural, which were deliberately portrayed in fanciful terms so as to try (unsuccessfully) to not become intense, was metaphorical and not personal.

Epicurus warned most poignantly against superstition.

I wish a concept would catch on which (I seem to remember) actually existed in my young day, namely to be agnostic (usually calling oneself atheist) but look for reasons to base one's moral outlook on wholesome secular principles.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics are mainly mental ideas for thinking. I don't think his attitude to "god" or "gods" was anywhere near as "moralistic" as has usually become commonplace since.

The merest mention of "god" seems to lead most people to this moralistic concept which doesn't warm, doesn't encourage, it just takes away from us. I sense a lot of people are getting "triggered". Using the three stages of perception Husserl identified occurring BEFORE we reach the judgment phase, we could fortify ourselves in the face of the "meme" aimed at our habitus, by revaluing as Nietzsche calls for.

Nietzsche who lived in the run up to Kaiser Bill times poignantly shows us a man with a lantern looking for "god" in daylight saying "we have killed him you and I" meaning the oppressing bourgeoisie. A "superman" or "overman" (English prepositions don't get it right) is someone that has to rise out of oppressing precisely by becoming their own free self. (The overgrowth in fundamentalism was a later counter-misreaction to the scene around Kaiser Bill whose supporters had emphasized how Christian they were.) I sense there is a lot of quasi-indexicality in Nietzsche - speaking in the voice of his characters, often without speech marks (some commentators hold Hume and Plato are doing this too).

Respect the other (e.g family members or employees) enough to leave them free as ends to themselves, and not your means to use only; don't go as far as despoiling the jungle or plain that helps you eat or the earth that helps you build.

What and who is, calls me to respect it / them: my own original version of is = ought. Apparently Hume was an ironist. Hume was probably only saying we won't catch many people inferring (to any partial degree) from is to ought because that's how people around him were, and wasn't laying down a categorical entailment in the opposite direction.

Virtues = going equipped.

Morals are to do with morale (Julian Baggini says).

When we de-intensify both morals and the optional extra religion, the latter might simply be a non-heavy going personal relationship, singly whether sometimes in the company of fellows or not. A god worth its salt doesn't need "defending" in the way usually thought. I have lots of affinity with honest atheistic agnostics. That my own discovered "redefining" of "god" differs from all those I meet reassures me (and amuses them). Thus, any existence or absence of mere religion around individuals left to choose (rather than pressured by agitators), ought to become a non-issue.

At this point on the existence wave, we have more propensity (1) to be than not to be. Whether when the wave turns round it will eat up what is, or simply carry on making things be but in mirror image, we'll be too old to find out.

(1) Propensity is a nice word I found in Popper.

This is in chapter 10, pp 224-250 of Tim Button & Sean Walsh, Philosophy and model theory, Oxford 2018. Typical footnotes refer to:

- Vaananen J and T Wang, 'Internal categoricity in arithmetic and set theory' in Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 56.1, pp 121-34

- Potter M, Set theory and its philosophy, Oxford 2004

Depending how close to or far from Dedekind one wanted to get (apparently).

I haven't looked those two pieces of literature cited up yet, I am looking for icing and marzipan in Button & Walsh like the dutiful child confronted with the canonical but fearsome Christmas "cake".

I am determined to fight my way into this field: they can't wall me out!

Another book sometimes referenced by Button & Walsh is Hrbacek K and T Jech, Introduction to set theory, 3 rd ed, Dekker 1999.

I don't want to get hold of Potter or Hrbacek only then to be told I still need a degree in maths before I start. Do any readers have experience of those two texts? I suppose periodical articles tend to be very technical and I don't know how to get hold of them?

Examples so far have not incorporated a participle. In my lifetime I heard the phrase "to square the circle" far more often than "a square circle".

Now if you treat the verb "square" in 2D geometry on a flat plane containing a circle, and square the area of the circle, the squared circle looks like a circle because its squareness is recessive (to look at). Yet we lengthened a straight line in it (perhaps by the square root of 2). Alternatively we may double the length of that line.

If it is sliced into segments, it shows two square corners. Thus circles are quite squary anyway: we only bring it out when slicing them.

Sorry. I'll give you a page reference later on, and shall see if they cite literature on it. Thank you for training me in good habits. :yikes:

It's a word Burrow & Walsh use. I got the impression they thought their bosses wouldn't want them to spell it out! :nerd:

Yes, most of the "paradoxes" from that period are just riddles. Another example I like is "all Cretans are liars" (a play on a prominent personality of the time) which is meant to illustrate the difference between an opposite and a contrary to "some Cretans are liars" and the real meaning is "not all Cretans are liars". I wish most of the people around today would understand this vital piece of logic!

Thank you for the link to the conundrums thread, I'm going to have huge enjoyment in that! :yum: :cool: :starstruck:

I'd have loved more maths of all kinds, but authorities tell you what not to do when you are stressed out at age 15 or 16 and have no guidance in assertiveness. I left school with only one (poor) A level but subsequently managed to get back in contact with languages (fortunately) but you know how it is one sits and thinks if only I had been a chemist / architect . . .

That was a smattering of web pages, plus a few newish second hand books I saw. I suppose the people that write these things don't understand "elementary".

I quite like the three stacks, oversimplification or no.

There must be a sort of "existence wave" in which we currently tend to exist rather than not exist. I gather mathematicians point to a "moment" when person and time "appeared" and shortly after, light (there must be a reason for its specific speed and spectrum of frequencies). Physics books I've read say that most of the 26 dimensions (or 10 by some counts) almost immediately "collapsed". There must be some sort of "pattern" according to which these things can form a "framework" for the current "phase".

Round squares look round because their squareness is "recessive". They simply have an extra level of abstractness from Pegasuses. All language always has been symbolic and allusive, and heavily based on symbolic allusions to symbolic allusions, all the time. The fabric of the universe is analogy, all the way down.

Some old fashioned books would even have Venn diagrams, with a little commentary / labelling: you can show a lot of ifs and buts on those. The latest "thinking" in all areas is too open-and-shut. And didn't Lewis Carroll make maths and logic entertaining?

I like this idea a great deal, even though I don't follow the equations. It's a sort of relative relativity. I've been fascinated by this since infancy, but there was no-one around to help me with it.

Truth leads to degrees of knowledge, not the other way round.

Truth means things like consistency and non-contradiction, both internal and external.

Anchored Train in particular is onto something. Empathy gives us opportunity for intersubjectivity and to weigh up testimony.

Etymologically "truth" is related to "tree" i.e a straight beam or plank from a trunk, used to show how "true" another line was.

Isaac, classical mechanics was found by Faraday, Maxwell and co. getting on for 200 years ago to be a special case of something bigger. (I have been reading Kaku.)

Our actions, before we undertook them, were contingent, but after we have presented them to those around us as a fait accompli, they experience them as a kind of necessity.

I believe the fields mentioned by Popper are of propensity to individuality. It is a shame boundaries aren't often mentioned in philosophy. Those are exchange places.

I believe necessity (in an occurrence) is a special case of contingency.

Libertarianism should be viewed as having both a metaphysical and an empirical basis.

Terrapin Station, bad planning has been going on on this planet for thousands of years, in my hypothesis.

I think any number of people will have introduced variations both during the old man's lifetime and afterwards. Also, this sort of thing is an especially big custom in Italy.

The thread belongs even more, to those who have matched the details of Gramsci's publications with activities carried out in his name, than to me, I only posted because I eye witnessed some goings on that were in fact attributed to his posthumous influence (via some Italian movements incidentally). You also only have to look at the enormous amount of baggage and unfinished business that are coming to light around the Ireland situation, with its very sad and long history.

Documents by those that lived through atrocities in many countries attest to similar manoeuvres.

Yes, bad planning, achieved by complex and laborious means, on large scales.

Sorry, I didn't realise you were making a paper Isaac, I hope you get the responses you need, but I don't see why my added posts should actually distract from that.

Manoeuvres of these kinds can be copied by any organisations anywhere, and weren't new with Gramsci himself. The more commercialised and sentimentalised religions have been operating in this ball park all the more in recent years. In the case of religions and some businesses, the "business model" has been imposed on them. It is particularly disappointing in the case of religions, which should have a good compass of their own to resist these kind of diversionary tactics, by faddists mostly.

If you haven't tasted rijstvlaai, you don't understand Belgium.

The universe is only semi-deterministic as there is so much contingency everywhere. Ayer pointed out that an obstacle to free will is constraint, not "determinism". I attach huge importance to freedom of religion and to you changing yours as often as you want. My advice is if you want to have one, don't choose one whose God regards you as a slave - either in its sources or the careless image projected by prominent operatives.

The latter. I had lengthy first hand experience. The cadres "induce" the subalterns to transfer their "affections" from the previous authority to them instead. It can be cloaked in all sorts of sentimentality, dynamism or superior-looking mystique but beware. The cadres will select individuals who are pliable enough "material" to represent a privileged element within the subalterns, initially making very sure to imply that it is the rest of us subalterns that are electing those. Hence the pretence at democracy. Further "elections" will be more contrived if they don't become less frequent. Dumbing down the system, and relying on the prevalence of a forelock-tugging mentality in the first place, are features.

These operatives and ringleaders wear the aura of semi “rehabilitated” IRA, or Italian revolutionaries, or Yaxley-Cummings “people” types. And they embed themselves everywhere. I mean everywhere. Religions, commerce. They render what we thought was hitherto proper authority, completely ineffective, no matter if there are still a few old-style seniors of attempted goodwill around. There is no recourse and there are no channels of responsibility-taking.