hmm hmm... Her clivage is pretty deep alright.

Let me refocus... St James Brown, pray for our souls.

I posted one on the purse of a woman... Women's purses are deep, aren't they?

At the begining of the thread, posted Puff the Magic Dragon. I initially thought it was a joke, as the title doesn't evoke much depth to me. But I wasn't about to act as some Torquemada of Lyrical Depth, so I thanked him for the entry and left it there. Then the next day he explained (to my shame) that this song meant a lot to him, so evidently it was no joke at all. So there's that.

I'm just never sure about my notion of what is actually 'deep'. In many ways I feel that my life is quite trivial, but oddly enough I find things that I think might be profound and deep, but do to my deeply trivial nature I'm never quite sure enough. — Mayor of Simpleton

Allow me a piece of facile and utterly useless advice: what is deep to you is what is deep. It's doesn't need to be heavy and political, or protest oriented. It can be contemplative, it can be introspective, whatever rocks your boat.

At worst, this thread is a place to share songs we like.

At best, it's a useful reminder that popular music is more than just a business. Songs have lyrics. There is poetry in them, that can help open mental doors. This poetry is literally all around us, in the lyrics of our most beloved songs.

So keep it coming, trivial as it may be.

Now that's deep, and deserves context.

I've gotten down to my last pair of shoes
Can't even win a nickel bet
Because, ah them that's got are them that gets
And I ain't got nothin' yet

I'm sneakin' in and out duckin' my landlord
All I seem to do is stay in debt
Because, ah them that's got (yeah) are them that gets
And I tell you all I ain't got nothin' yet

That old sayin' them that's got are them that gets
Is somethin' I can't see
If ya gotta have somethin' before you can get somethin'
How do ya get your first is still a mystery to me

I see folk with long cars and fine clothes
That's why they're called the smarter set
Because they manage to get
When only them that's got supposed to get
And I ain't got nothin' yet
Whoa, I tell you all
I ain't found nothing yet

That old sayin' them that's got are them that gets
Is somethin' I can't see
If ya gotta have somethin' before you can get somethin'
How do ya get your first is still a mystery to me

You know I just don't understand it
I can't seem to get a nickle or a dime for a cup of coffee
I need a hamburguer in fact a hot dog wouldn't be too bad
I would just be grateful if I could get my hands on most anything

Ray Charles

Do you think sexual reproduction involves any processes that are not built up out of the processes of the cells that are built up out of molecules that are built up out of atoms that are built up out of quarks etc? Is there some magic that happens somewhere in there? If not, then that's not strong emergence. — Pfhorrest

Now you are changing the goal post. Initially you defined 'strong emergentism' as such:

, "strong" emergentism holds some wholes to be truly greater than the sums of their parts, and thus that when certain things are arranged in certain ways, wholly new properties apply to the whole that are not mere aggregates or composites of the properties of the parts. — Pfhorrest

Atoms don't reproduce, and molecules don't reproduce. They don't have any 'elementary reproduction', so I don't see any reason to assume they have any 'elementary consciousness' as a way to explain our consciousness... Both are just behaviors that emerged through life.

The act of reproduction is not something that you can summon by simply putting atoms together in a big unstructured heap or soup. The structure holding those atoms together is what makes it alive, and it is what gets reproduced. And by definition this structure is not contained in its elements. It's more than the sum of its parts.

If you had read the web of reality thread, you'd see I already agree that everything is made of information. — Pfhorrest

If you wrote more succinctly, I would read your posts.

Try and understand what I am saying about the Heraclitus river. What is a river? It is not actually defined by the specific molecules of water flowing through it. Otherwise you wouldn't see the same river twice. Likewise your body is not defined by the atoms flowing through it.

Weakly emergent phenomena build up out of more fundamental phenomena. The kinds of emergent phenomena that Kenosha lists are things that build up out of the phenomena exhibited by basic physical particles: if you model their motion, mass, charge, etc, and model an appropriate aggregate of them just in terms of their motion, mass, charge, etc, you get the emergent phenomena in the model for free. — Pfhorrest

You mean this theoretically, or you think it is actually possible and done? Because the cases where it's actually doable are rare. The statistical reduction of temperature to Brownian movement in a perfect gas is the only case that comes to mind, and even this implies all sorts of simplifications (a perfect gas does not actually exist, it's a theoretical simplification of a physical reality). So defined as you do, 'weak emergence' is more a theoretical than proven.

Basically, it's magic. — Pfhorrest

LOL. Says the guy who thinks that electron have a micro dose of consciousness... Thanks for the laugh! You can't beat this place for entertainment.

Have you ever heard of sexual reproduction? It is a universal property of living systems, and you can't find it anywhere in non living stuff. Stones and stars don't copulate. QED here is a strongly emerging phenomenon.

it must draw some arbitrary line somewhere, the line between things that are held to be entirely without anything at all like phenomenal consciousness and things that suddenly have it in full, — Pfhorrest

I draw the line at life. More precisely, as far as stuff with consciousness are concerned, I include any living species that need to sleep, and that includes quite a few.

Why sleep as a cut-off point? Sleep is near universal among birds and mammals and yet it represents a risky behavior re. predators, a behavior that would not have been selected without a very strong darwinian advantage. It is thought to be a way to refresh the brain and it's information management capacity. Eg memory is affected by lack of sleep in many species, including insects. Thus it seems that sleep as a behavior is connected to learning through complex neuronal systems.

Note that stars and planets and stones and electron don't sleep, other than in the occasional figure of speech, and that one cannot explain sleep as a 'weakly emerging' phenomenon. It's like the example of sex given above...

I finally read you OP. The gross mistake in it, is to assume that human being are made of atoms. It may be what their matter is made of, but in practice human beings are not produced by chemical synthesis. They are made by sexual reproduction, which means that the production of a human being involved copying, random sampling and mixing the genomes of two other human beings (the parents). It is information-intensive.

You and I are made of information, essentially.

You think you're made of your atoms because you don't understand biology. It's a misconception. Let me try and explain.

You must know that our body is composed of water, 75% of the whole weight or so. This water is constantly flowing through our bodies, like water flows in a river. We drink, we urinate, we sweat. Our body manages water as a flow, not as a static reservoir. There is not a single molecule of water inside you right now that has been with you for more than a few weeks. The same applies to proteins that tend to decay and get eliminated and resynthetised all the time.

Life is information bossing matter around. It uses matter, it builds upon it, but it is not defined by any closed set of atoms. It manages matter and energy as fluxes, as pipelines that help maintain a structure, a shape, an in-formation, which is what you are really made of.

If one thinks (as you seem to) that one is made of atoms, then one must see oneself like the river of Heraclitus: always different, inexistent as a stable entity. Because the matter composing your body is constantly 'flowing' through your body like a river flows in its bed.

I find the existence of evil hard to explain in an atheist framework, by the way. Does anyone have a theory? I think Freud's Thanatos is perhaps the begining of an idea.

Okay, I have no objection to that. That is still weak emergence — Pfhorrest

What's your objection to strong emergence?

Old argument, but a logical one. The existence of evil pleads for manichaeism rather than monotheism. Hence the character of the Devil, as the god of evil.

A Woman's Purse

A woman's purse weighs like her whole life was inside it
Between a book she never finished reading and some makeup to stop the flow of time
There's her picture taken a year ago that she put aside because she didn't like it
But looking at it again now she realizes she was beautiful, though she didn't know it

A woman's purse recognizes her hands and only hers can get in
Hidden in a pocket there's an ad for a journey she's been wanting to go on forever
Millions of receipts, as useless analgesics for her pains
And for her stupid guilt for wanting to please

And if she could go back to those days
Of caresses in her hair
For only two minutes of it
She would pay one thousand years
Years spent to find again
The things that one managed to lose
The longing to smile, to forgive
The weakness to still be
Like the others want her to be

A woman's purse never matches what she's living
It hides her phone, jealous of who's calling her
Next to her keys, the same obsession to forget them again
And in that apparent mess, the fear of being lonely
A woman's purse can reveal her secrets instantly
And maybe her life has distractedly strayed into yours
You, who thought there was still room for another love
But in a woman's purse, there's no place for forgetting

And go where your heart brings you
Another cut in your driving license
You've been there a thousand times, but
You've never understood anything about it
Nothing there helps you understand
The meaning of a night that cannot enchant
The meaning of you recalling and making plans
Forgetting to live in the moment
Now that a wind rises that blows away the clouds
That takes away the winters
The dust, the doubts, the miracles
After having waited for a thousand years
Years spent to find again
The things that one managed to lose
The longing to smile, to forgive
The weakness to still be
Like others want you to be

A woman's purse weighs like my whole life was inside it

Speculating about old age when young is an entertaining diversion, but not very productive. — jgill

Rest assured that I am not technically young anymore.

I don't believe that old age is the age of wisdom, but a progressive advance towards stupidity. — David Mo

We lose neurons everyday. Ultimately, there aren't enough left, and we lose our mind. But I still think that we learn something on the way, some 'wisdom'.

we are all sons of the winners - in the case of the West: Greece and Rome -; being ressentful for those who have long since lost, means nothing on the grand scale of humanity. — Gus Lamarch

Yes, and even though we may like the historical underdogs, those who lost, it doesn't mean that them losers where any better morally speaking.

.
Mind you, the European project is about that: recognising that there exists a European indentify, built through empires as it was, that transcends national identities. The project makes sense because European nationalism and division killed so many in the last century.

Any European who resent the Roman Empire for killing millions should remember what happened in the 1940's in those oh-so-civilized parts.

History is filled to the brim with horrors. No nation, no tribe is innocent. Placating our modern views and standards on the past as you are doing is pretty useless. Sure the Caesars killed many, that what kings and emperors do... Water under the bridge.

More precisely, Wittgenstein pointed out that what we think is a jigsaw puzzle is not really a jigsaw puzzle. So we shouldn't call it a jigsaw puzzle, maybe call it a game instead. And all those philosophers who think they are doing a jigsaw puzzle, and are looking for pieces to fit together are self-deceived and will never get anywhere, because they think they're doing a jigsaw puzzle when they're not. — Metaphysician Undercover

This sounds like an apology of incoherence. Just because one philosopher failed to have coherent thoughts doesn't mean others can't or shouldn't try to.

What Are You Dreaming?
-- Abū al-Ṭayyib Aḥmad ibn Al-Ḥusayn Al-Mutanabbī Al-Kindī (ca.915 – 965 CE)

What is there to feel happy about?
I have neither family, country, friend, wine nor confidant
What can I hope from this time I am living in?
Can it give me what it cannot give itself?
Expect nothing from time, you are only its passenger
So long as your soul is imprisoned in your body
If it is a joyful time, the joy will not last
And if it is a time of misfortune, it too shall pass

How many times have they told you I was truly dead?
But as soon as I shook, the shrouds would disappear
No man can achieve all his hopes
As no wind blows according to the ship's desire

It is the tragedy of lovers, blinded in their infatuation
Ignorant of the fact that love is ephemeral
Their eyes and souls soon tire
Deceived by false appearances
Go! May the wary camels carry you far from me
There is no distance that can touch me now
I died at your lovely soirée
Which of your souls could replace the one I lost?

How many times have they told you I was truly dead?
But as soon as I shook, the shrouds would disappear
No man can achieve all his hopes
As no wind blows according to the ship's desire

Just try to understand this
You, whom I address from afar [Fortune?]
Nothing can escape its own limitations
Thanks to you, no neighbor can keep his honor
After feeding on your grass,
His animal's milk run dry
Whoever spends time with you will only reap fatigue
And receive nothing but hatred but jealousy from you

How many times have they told you I was truly dead?
But as soon as I shook, the shrouds would disappear
No man can achieve all his hopes
As no wind blows according to the ship's desire

Let's call them the A word and the N word, then...:smile:

Good question. On a purely existential level, getting old appears to me better than the alternative. At least at this point; I might change my mind later. It is a curse on some levels alright, including health and sex wise, and a blessing on others, such as wisdom, I think.

My favorite proverb on the topic (I love proverbs, they are pearls of folk wisdom) is: "Si jeunesse savait, et si vieillesse pouvait..." (if only youth knew, and if only old age could). This draws attention to an increase in wisdom that is commensurate (and perhaps linked with) a decrease in physical and mental powers. It's more useful to be wise when one is physically weak than when one is strong. A youth can fail and rise again. In fact that's how she or he is going to acquire some wisdom: by trial and error. On the contrary, an old person must use this acquired knowledge to avoid errors, which could more easily doom her than when she was 20.

That'd be why the old are conservative and often boring: risk aversion grows with age.

I would argue that the reason why most people would rather get raped rather than get murdered has more to do with their fear of imminent death rather than a desire to live longer. — TheHedoMinimalist

You would rather be murdered than raped, personally?

Some beliefs don't submit to facts, because they are more than mere thoughts. They structure our thoughts, given them meaning within a frame of reference, and also filter what is allowed to flow into our stream of consciousness and what is not allowed. That'd be why you can't talk an atheist into believing in god, or vice versa. Beliefs are not like a carpet that we can easily change. They are the supporting and defensive walls of our mental house, and we constantly repair them, invest in them and defend them. If a fact comes in that contradict cherished beliefs, that fact will simply be filtered out. It won't be accepted as a fact.

. Just as the Earth was round back then as it is now, genocide, ethno-supremacism, and misogynism were just as wrong back then as they are now — Tristan L

European people are the result of the breeding of pre-Indo-European females with Indo-European males. We are the children of millions of rapes spread over the continent and 2000 years.

Does DNA intend to copy itself correctly? — Harry Hindu

Not really I suppose. But the fact is that it is getting copied inside your body at this very moment, quite a lot in fact, because your body constantly produces new cells to replace the ones dying. And if the copies are too different from the original, you may well die as a result. Doctors call it cancer.

So DNA doesn't really want to be replicated but if it doesn't get replicated, or if it gets replicated not exactly as it should, it dies.

sorry, pocket post...

Of course the nazi could have been me. I was lucky.


O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis
nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ludo mentis aciem,
egestatem,
potestatem
dissolvit ut glaciem.

Sors immanis
et inanis,
rota tu volubilis,
status malus,
vana salus
semper dissolubilis,
obumbrata
et velata
michi quoque niteris;
nunc per ludum
dorsum nudum
fero tui sceleris. ....

O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
ever waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
playing with mental clarity;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.

Fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy. ...

In Carmina Burana

"The loss of the self in the monolith" sounds like an apt description of death. Our body will become mineral, as a matter of fact. But while we are alive, we're fighting the darn monolith, the way I see it. Life is about fighting entropy, not submitting to it. Even if we know we can't win that fight for very long, that's what we do when we are alive.

it was a cornerstone of the European medieval world view. The wheel of fortune was a symbol of it. — frank

Fortune is an ancient personification (deification) of randomness. The idea behind the wheel of fortune -- as I understand it -- is that one cannot be lucky or unlucky for very long; Fortuna is fickle and changing. Which is basically true, poetry set aside. Of course it was framed during early medieval times within a Christian discourse about God's intervention on earth, and therefore given a more determinist interpretation (God is behind apparent randomness, acting through it).

When time was born, you were already there in potential waiting for your turn on the stage. — frank

That strikes me as hard to believe. But yeah, as long as human thoughts count for something, I would say that determinism is internally logical.

Well then, your definition of 'Volition' above -- or the very question "does volition exist?" for that matter -- would not even exist as a question or definition, if not for some act of human agency (a deliberate choice being made), aka answer c.

It would not have emerged into this world if volition did not exist.

If 'volition' is defined as the capacity to select a unique option amongst several considered options, you display it everytime you write a post here and chose your words a bit carefully.

And if someone tells that your choice only appears deliberate but in fact it's not, because he says that we're just the puppets of your molecules... well, ask yourself why you should trust him, if he is indeed just a puppet of his own molecules and not a cogent, rational, logical thinker... The only reason we listen to others in the first place is because we assume that their thinking is potentially useful, and more meaningful than a chemical soup.

The true tragedy of life is NOT that we can't analyse 'meaning' or 'volition'; it is that we are trapped in meaning, and trapped in choice-making. To make sense of the world is our fate, not our choice. To act is our destiny, to chose, our principal function. Even not to act is a type of action, even not chosing is a form of choice... We are shackled to choice. We have no choice but to chose. That's the real tragedy of life.

That's why I find art and poetry and dreams and metidation useful, they help me get out of the choice analytics treadmill. Breathe a bit, take a break. Make room for mystery as a fact of life. It's important to losen the mental determinism a bit, to give one's mental chains some slack, and some rest.

Laise un peu de vague à ton âme, as the poet put it. Allow your soul to be a little vague.

Volition is the power to choose. — frank

Fair enough. When you wrote those words quoted above, did you:

a) in fact want to say something else entirely, but these are the words that came out of your fingers interacting with the keyboard, somehow?
b) not want to say anything in particular, these are just words that came out of your fingers interacting with the keyboard in automatic writing mode?
c) have something you wanted to say, and after cursorly considering a few options, selected what appeared the best to say what you wanted to say?
d) other - please specify.

In other words, can you explain the emergence on TPF of the Volition definition above, as the power to chose, without referring to some act of will? Without invoking some sort of intent on your side?

As above, please define 'volition'. I am speaking of 'agency', which may or may not be the same thing.

You ask good questions, which counts for something.

Into that cavern of unknowns, you place volition as a necessary ingredient, yet we have no schematic for reason and meaning. How is volition supposed to relate to things like math, the ability to imagine and hypothesize, and logic in general? — frank

I don't have any complete answer to that but here would be my take.

Reason and meaning are things we experience daily. They are part of us. We strongly identify with our own thinking. We tend to think of our own thoughts as reasonable and meaningful, whether or not this is confirmed by others. This is the way of the mind: like any system it is made of elements, it is based on a certain axiomatic, an a priori set of tools. For instance the concepts of truth and meaning. You cannot think without using these concepts, because they underwrite your thinking. Another example is logic. Natural human logic is not exactly like mathematical logic but it's very close to it, as close as you can ever get between a human idea and its formal codification, I would guess. Another example of an a priori mental tool is a 3D euclidian space. You're born with it, it's part of the standard operating system.

Concepts such as truth or meaning are hard to analyse because you must assume them in any analysis. You cannot approach them 'from outside'. So when someone says: "meaning and truth do not exist", he naturally assumes that what he just said is meaningful and true, thereby contradicting himself. There's no exit, no way out of these concepts except madness. So let's use them, since we cannot do otherwise, even though we cannot anylse them productively. We have no other choice than trust our intuition of them; we are indeed predetermined to think in those terms.

As for 'volition', I am not sure what it means for you. My money is on something we cannot avoid but doing.

I try to be as vague as possible, but someone has to ask. Really, trot along to a physics forum, and when you find out what stuff is, come and explain it to me. I suppose if E = mc^2 and energy is activity, then it seems that stuff is pure active relation of emptiness to strings or quarks or fuck knows.

But I don't have to care about that. For the convenience of human understanding, light and matter is stuff. — unenlightened

Yes to that. We know very little of what matter, energy, fields, space, time etc. 'really' are, so the term 'stuff' is adequate. It describes precisely what we positively know about 'what exists', i.e. very little.

I have not considered that possibility. That would kind of be a convenient way to get your prison sentence reduced for raping someone in a world where murder is punished less — TheHedoMinimalist

Imagine you have been raped by a big guy who overpowered you and, your know, invaded your intimacy. Suppose he let you live rather than kill you afterward. Let's further assume that it was quite painful for you. Months or years later, he's been caught by the cops and you are attending his trial. So you are given the following alternative, as in the above conversation: either you live and ensure that your rapist is punished harshly, or you allow him to kill you right there in the courtroom, so that his sentence would be lightened.

What choice would you make?

Consider that you have already been raped at this point, that this harm has already been done to you, and that no amount of further harm done to you will attenuate any harm previously done to you.

Consider also that you have no interest in lightening your rapist's sentence.

What choice would you make, as a rapist victim?

You see? It's facile to troll about armchair philosophy on murder and rape. But until you see things from the victim's point of view, you're just making noise with your mouth.

1) We can observe how there is near universal agreement between theists and atheists that a God either exists, or not, one or the other. — Hippyhead

If we want to be totally exhaustive, there is also the possibility that there exist several gods.

a father should be more willing to engage in vigilante justice if the rapist of his daughter receives a light punishment then if the murderer of his daughter receives a light punishment — TheHedoMinimalist

Any father I know would be happy that his daughter is alive.

So you are saying that suicide is the long term solution to all short-term problems.

You speak lightly of these matters. I wish you will never have to chose between your life and the integrity of your anus., but if you ever have to, I recommend keeping your life.

So you'd you rather be murdered than raped?

And by the way, you can of course disagree with simple logic -- scores of illogical 'philosophers' do it all the time -- but it's at your own expense.

Thanks. That's always the most important!

To say that an error occurred, or that some information replication system got something wrong, is saying that this system had intent to do it one way and it worked out a different way. Does DNA possess intent? — Harry Hindu

You'd have to ask him. But it certainly looks like DNA is getting copied a lot.

More precisely, my point is that intellectual activities such as science and philosophy cannot deny the agency of human reason without contradicting their own existence. And it's not an intuitive argument but a purely logical one. Reason cannot be used to debase reason.