problems of the persons more than problems of the gadgets, though the gadgets aid and abet the obsessive. — Bitter Crank

New technology always has benefits and costs (everything necessarily has benefits and costs), but often we lose sight of that in the hype and excitement around new toys. The costs usually involve some lack of mesh between some people's proclivities and propensities, and the new thing - and the disjoint, the gear-grinding, would never have had an opportunity to manifest until the thing was invented (although it might have shown up in something analogous or otherwise partly related - e.g. he was formerly a gambler who used to waste time at the local bookies, now he's addicted to opening "lockboxes" in videogames.).

it may be there fault, to some degree, to not guard against addiction once they know they are liable to be hooked — Bitter Crank

Yeah that's true. The way I look at it is that yes, we are given (and therefore cannot be morally faulted for) this vast ocean liner of an ongoing bundle of habits, some from our genes, some from early training and environmental affordances. In that context, our rational mind, our awake, rational self is like a tugboat - small in relation to that bulk, but quite powerful despite its smallness, and capable of shifting the mass in a new direction if persistently applied (more or less in a CBT/Stoic manner). And I think we properly criticize each other morally when we "let ourselves slide" and fail to utilize the power of our little tugboat to get us out of our messes.

Of course we should all work harder for the common good and naturally we don't. — Bitter Crank

As I say, I think there's a balance to be struck - "all work and no play ..." etc. Playing, relaxation, pastimes definitely have a place in the economy of a life, just as consumption more generally. But one has to output too, for maximum fulfillment, and that's the danger of all addictions (and probably most drug addictions too), they can lead to a life filled with passive consumption, which is ultimately unsatisfying. It's the miniature version, in the individual, of the larger, public "freedom requires eternal vigilance."

Can gaming do this? — Janus

There are some peak moments in some of the story-driven games. Gaming has two aspects, the gamey aspect (competitive, learning a skill, a system, etc.) and the immersive aspect (the sense of being another character in another world). Most videogames are a blend of these two aspects, albeit weighted more towards one aspect or the other, and that's what makes them unique, their own thing. They're like miniature real worlds that you inhabit, that have simplified rules that allow you to win more than you would in real life (that's what makes them addictive, you get the pleasure jag of overcoming obstacles that are just within your reach to overcome, if you put in a little bit of effort).

It's the videogames that are weighted more towards story and immersion that offer something similar to novels and movies, and there have been a few games (by companies like BioWare, Bethesda, the now-defunct Looking Glass, and several other notable companies) that have had some storylines/quests that have provided thoughtful ethical problems, and rewarded the player with a real emotional payoff, made all the more present and real by virtue of the interactivity and immersion factor. I'm not ashamed to say that there have been a few occasions where I've made a decision that's led to an NPC (non-player character) having an emotional change of heart or epiphany, and it's made me cry.

I wouldn't want to say that happens all the time, but it does happen, and players love and praise companies like BioWare who provide those "magical moments."

And this is a coordinated, conscious undertaking? Or an uncoordinated trend? — frank

A bit of both, as most of these large, historical movements have been. There are lots of people who simply "breathe together" because they believe the same things. I remember myself when I was a socialist, it just seemed obvious that entryism in politics, and homing in on capturing the education system as the number one overall priority, was the obvious min-max strategy. (And I hadn't even read Gramsci at that point - it's just obvious. Wasn't there a famous Jesuit saying about education? "Give me someone when they're five" or something :) )

On the other hand, it would be foolish to discount the likelihood of actual conspiracies strictly so-called. The problem with actual conspiracy theories is threefold: 1) you're unlikely to get everyone on the same page, so they will often work at cross-purposes, 2) you don't always get what you want anyway (law of unintended consequences), and 3) as you get older you realize how hard it is to organize something even above board in the light of day - how much harder then, to organize something sub rosa. But conspiracies are occasionally found out from time to time, and, again, it would be stupid to think that the ones that have been found out are the only ones that have ever existed.

I think there's definitely been some actual conspiratorial stuff going on at a high level between what one might call "transnationalist socialists" and crony capitalists. And it's not even all that secret (Bilderberg group, etc.). There has been a drive to erase the nation state as a thing - partly in the no doubt sincere (but I think mistaken) belief that nations as such are the cause of war (this would be largely the motivation for Left/liberal utopians and transnationalist socialists); partly because it's better for big business if Rome has a single neck, as it were - if everything is centralized and run bureaucratically, with consent manufactured (this would be the main motivation for big business). There's also a strong animus against European/American males - mainly I think because they're the biggest potential spanner in the works of globalist ambitions. (This is actually the tail that's wagging the dog re. all the anti-White, anti-male propaganda that saturates the mainstream - the ideological twaddle behind it is just squid-ink for the useful idiots.)

Unfortunately for the globalists (though fortunately for the world) they rather overplayed their hand, and we're now starting to see the frog noticing that it's been being boiled, and jumping out of the pot.

No one in particular screwed up and de-industrialized the US. To some extent that happened because of the success of labor unions. — frank

I don't think that's true. I think there was a deliberate, concerted attempt to weaken the US, as it's the biggest potential adversary of globalist ambitions.

(To clarify, in this context, by "globalism" I mean the unholy alliance between transnationalist socialism and crony capitalism. The central premise of globalism is that the nation state has had its day and has got to go; its its destruction - the dissolution of borders, national sovereignty, democracy, etc., and their replacement by a global system of social engineering and corporate management - would be convenient for both Leftist utopian ideologues and for big banking and corporations.)

To be clear, if someone says that a candidate for presidential office ought to win it appears to mean that they believe it’s morally right for them to win, or that the candidate will perform virtuously in that position. — praxis

Yes, that is correct. And I am entirely serious. I believe the received wisdom about Trump among the "intelligentsia" is completely wrong, as wrong as wrong can be. The hysterical opposition to him is literally insane, a mind-virus.

Is there a book you would recommend? — frank

No this isn't really in books yet, mostly in scientific papers. The link I gave is an excellent resource on the topic in itself, with many further links.

You realized it was morally right for him to win. — praxis

Yes, of course. But obviously we have different conceptions of who he is, what he stands for and what he's doing.

The best theory at the moment seems to be the predictive processing idea.

The idea is that our brains approximate Bayesian machines by some quick and dirty methods (because true Bayesian prediction would be computationally too expensive); the result is that the fundamental driving force in all cognitive processing (and proceeding from that, all human action) is maximizing certainty and minimizing surprise.

Not terribly new or ... surprising. At least in basic concept (the idea that our brains are in some sense Bayesian machines has been around for a while, and people like Popper and Dennett have talked about similar or analogous ideas in the past). But it seems to be the new hotness in neurology and neurophilosophy, backed up by lots of research and maths, and some very big brains.

So yes, in that sense, the function of perception is to "defeat chaos."

Yeah I watched several of Trump's rallies on YT. The first one I watched in dread, out of a sense of duty, just to see what he was about (I had the same received opinion about him as most others here). Eventually I came increasingly to admire him and after watching him for the third time, I realized that he ought to win, he had to win, and would win.

Did you watch any of his rallies? Everything was there in most of them: the Wall, deregulation, getting the US out of bad trade deals, cutting taxes, etc. More detailed versions of his policies were on his campaign website.

Populists don't rely on mere policy positions to get elected. — praxis

Who does? Everyone uses the Dark Arts. But policies do matter too, and Trump's policies were certainly a major part of what got him elected, and Adams has always said that.

Yes, the courts are and have been for quite some time now biased against fathers and males generally, as a result of Feminist academic influence and Feminist lobbying. And in society generally, the so-called "intelligentsia" and media parrot abroad the insane idea of "toxic masculinity."

The reality all this masks is that females, while not quite as prone to violence as men, aren't all that far behind, especially in cases of domestic violence, and parents abusing or killing their children. This would seem to mandate a more even-handed approach to child custody; but for example (I forget the details, but you can check this out) that was blocked in the US by NOW, which sought to uphold the "tender years doctrine" as it's called (the idea that all things being equal, the mother should automatically have custody) - and yet if an MRA points out the discrepancy, it gets blamed by Feminists on "patriarchy" and "toxic masculinity." The whole thing is a kafkaesque shitshow.

I doubt Adams himself would claim that Trump was elected "just by having policies people like." — praxis

Actually IIRC he's been fairly consistent about that.

The animus against Trump really is quite insane.

The book does differentiate between aristotelianism and platonism. — Πετροκότσυφας

One can't exactly avoid differentiating between Aristotelianism and Platonism, but the difference between Aristotelianism and Platonism is less than the difference between both of them and modern philosophy - Aristotle saw himself as developing and revising ideas in Platonism and earlier philosophies.

I took Wayfarer's comment in that sense, as cheering on the general revival of interest in classical philosophical ideas that's been building some momentum in recent years.

The book is about neo-aristotelians, not neo-platonists — Πετροκότσυφας

I think in the broader context, they're closer to each other than either of them are to modern philosophy.

I too cheer on the signs of revival of - let's call them "classical" - philosophical ideas.

that nobody gives a flying fuck about Elton John any more — Baden

Just taking this point, that's part of the charm. The fact that he's not a "smooth-talking liberal" hep to the lastest popular music trends, is part of why he's loved. (Compare and contrast Hillary desperately trying to ally herself with popular celebrities.)

You just don't understand how much everything from "politics as usual" to the cult of political correctness is hated and loathed by ordinary people. The feeling in the country among the working classes and lower middle classes (and around the world, with the general populist revolts) is one of extreme dislike of university-indoctrinated, free riding elites, and what they've been doing to the world, comparable to the hate for rentier aristocrats during the French revolution.

Traits don't emerge from high IQ, lol. — Posty McPostface

Did I say they did?

It’s no wonder people hate IQ and intelligence research because it reveals a set of seriously dismal facts about the incredible range of ability among human beings. — Vinson

Yes, unfortunately that's very true. Although IQ is only one of a vast range of traits that vary among individuals and consistently among certain groups, it's probably the most important as a marker for overall success and prosperity, partly because high IQ is related to the the ability to time-bind and delay gratification, and that's very much related to the "middle class" traits that make for success.

There's a vague fantasy on the Left that human beings are equal in potential, so that if you see unequal outcomes that logically has to be the result of some (usually "systemic") injustice somewhere. This silly idea is at the root of the idea of "social justice" and of most of the quasi-religious, cultic lunacy on the modern Left. Any facts that seem to speak against this unquestioned, unexamined background idea have to be rejected with the same sort of hysterical vehemence religious nutcases used to reserve for "heresy."

Defining Western Civilization as liberal, capitalist democracies, it's objectively the greatest civilization that's ever been. If you look at the average income of human beings, it's basically flat for all of humanity, until it takes off asymptotically in the 19th century. It's also the best for human rights and morality there's ever been (the first major civilization to outlaw slavery), best for minorities and alternative lifestyles, best for the environment, best for the arts, best for pretty much everything.

Most of the gripes against it come from spoiled, coddled brats who have no sense of history and the kind of suffering human beings have had to undergo throughout most of it, and the amount of struggle it took to build it.

What tends to happen with such people is that they take the gains that have been achieved for granted, and posit a perfect ideal, with only the vaguest idea of how to go about getting there, other than tearing down what has been achieved. The result is always, predictably, disastrous.

Eh? It's not difficult: "We get huge audiences comparable to big musical attractions like Elton John, without the benefit of any special musical talent or any requirement for a big space such as big sports events would need, because I'm a great speaker and I'm a stable genius."

What's not to like?

If the parents don't know what they're doing, you or some other person who isn't close to the children (such as the State) knows even less.

The metaphor of the wise blind men and the elephant comes to mind. :)

I do think a lot of these can be collapsed together into the two seemingly opposed camps of externalism and internalism, but even there the oppositionality is somewhat misconceived, IMHO..

The best analogy here, I think, is to the relationship between value and price in economics.

Prices as we know them in the market (comparable to the shared, objective, externalist meanings) are the relatively stable precipitate of a vast multitude of fluctuating individual valuing actions, where people are exchanging the less valued (on their present personal scale of values, which may change over time) for the more valued (this being comparable to the little ongoing process of attaching/detaching meaning to things that each of us has going on internally).

Similar process with language itself in fact - although that's meaning in an even narrower sense, still it shows the same sort of relationship between a vast tiling of shifting individual usages resulting in relatively stable overall objective patterns of shared use.

Disgust and even hate are necessary aspects of a full life, they definitely have a time and place and a useful function - although it's probably unwise for anyone's mental health to be permanently switched "on" in those modes.

There's definitely something to that idea. Funnily enough I've just been reading Herbert Spencer's First Principles, which has a wonderful first few chapters on the topic of where, if anywhere, religion and science coincide.

And if they coincide anywhere, it's on this essentially mysterious fact of existence as such. Science gives us the timings and predictability (what used to be called "properties") of existence, but not its nature; religion at first pretended that knowing the nature of existence was easy (spirits much like us, with motivations much like us, etc.), and the timings and predictability mysterious (capricious, like us, so needing propitiation). The one seems to be giving way to the other, and yet both seem to be converging on us not really knowing what the hell is going on, apart from that we have a better handle on the timings and predictability of things.

What this (gesturing around) actually is, nobody is any the wiser after thousands of years of profound thought, ultimately, it completely escapes the boundaries of reason. Yet we are it, and we know it in a non-verbal sort of way.

egregious generality — TheMadFool

It's necessarily general because the meaning of life is particular to the individual, the resultant of their personal relationship with the cosmos, given the potential they have. So you can only give a general outline and general method (and that might not even work for some people), and remind people of the essence of it being a life satisfactorily lived in the here and now (even though that may require some time-binding, foresight, planning, etc.).

The lived-through texture of presence, existence, is the thing, and it's different for everyone.

I think love factors into it for sure, but a) people often confuse love with hormonal lust (which fades after a while) and b) the "calculations" aren't necessarily conscious, in fact often they aren't, but the inner machinery is chungling away making its own estimate, and the delivery to consciousness is simply that the person finds themselves behaving a certain way ("Why did I do that?")

Animals without any such symbolic apparatus and capacity for thought as we have, also behave "as if" they make such calculations too. Evolution responds to what Dennett called "free-floating rationales" - what Aristotle would have called "Telos."

The degree to which love is a factor differs for different cultures at different times - and there's a lot of possibility between the one pole of absolute romantic love (the relevant partners choosing by elective affinity) and the other pole of totally arranged marriage (the parents and extended family choosing for the partners, on the basis of the market/cultural aspects). Inbetween you have what was normal in the West - the weighting being towards romantic love, but the children consulting the parents and taking their advice seriously.

Just wanna come back and address these together as they all hit on similar points that I think deserve to be expanded upon. — StreetlightX

Not sure that does answer my point, which is about infinite divisibility. It's the divisibility of the line that creates the numbers - IOW it's the notionally zero-width cut that separates the continuum into parts that creates the numbers, it's not that you're building up a bunch of nothings into a something, as with Zeno.

And so long as you can do that, you can find a common measure.

Can't see how that works in general. — Rank Amateur

Well it works in general in that being is an energetic thing, a process, not a static quality, and the process of living through life fulfilling one's potential is its own reward. It's the parallel, on the active plane, of the passive reception of sensory information - it's what we've got to work with, it's the stuff of stuff, we know of no stuff other than the stuff we experience. Similarly, we know of no other source of happiness than a life well lived, unfolding potential, fulfilling it.

Human beings have certain potentialities (things they're good at, or would be under a given set of circumstances), everyone has a different set, based on their biology, their "build" as organic machines, and then their "bildung," the process whereby that potential expresses itself (is educed), in the context of their family, community, etc. The purpose of life is to fulfil (or in the older, classical philosophical jargon "perfect") your particular set of potentialities, in the context that you're given.

So: the purpose of life is to be the best you that you can be, in the world as you find it.

The exercise of that functionality brings happiness, in the higher sense of fulfillment (as opposed to the lower sense of the hedonistic whim gratification), which is the self-contained meaning of life. IOW, the meaning of life is to be found in the exercise, the enjoyment, the lived-through process, of self-perfection.

(Note: often that will include some contribution to, and perfection of, the community that sustains you, but it needn't necessarily - it's a question of weighting, which will be different for different people, and the appropriate weighting is for each individual to discover.)

It's basically that evolution can kickstart something that has its own life and internal logic, which then spreads out into possibility spaces that have nothing necessarily to do with the original evolutionary rationale.

For example, evolution leads to animals finding, using or making shelters, but suppose a species "learns" to make something that satisfies the basic requirements of shelter, the construction of shelters can then take on its own internal logic (consider the profusion of types of bird's nests, for example) that no longer necessarily has anything to do with the purely evolutionary function of shelter (though it can do, some aspects of the bizarrerie of the different bird's nests do also have evolutionary functions - but not all).

Similarly, rationality, intelligence, have a use and function from an evolutionary point of view, that's why they developed, but once they exist, those functions have their own internal logic that opens up new spaces of possibility.

Or, initially, counting is for things like counting the animals in one's herd, comparing with others (and that, the process of herding is already itself something that's moved on quite a bit from its evolutionary origins), but then the process of counting can be abstracted, numbers discovered, etc.

The perennial question then seems to be, ok, that happens, but what about those possibility spaces? Are they something inherent in the Universe from yea time in some Platonic sense, or are they simply an accidental by-product of taking one step after another?

An amusing analogy to compare and contrast: I recently grew a beard. The "look" of me with the beard is completely different from the "look" of me without, I look like a different person (so to speak). Now in some sense the shape of that beard, its particular style of bushiness, etc., (which comes out the same fairly consistently after it grows back after a shave) is latent in my chemistry, biology and physiology - clearly this does just seem to be a case of one thing (proteins, etc.) building on another in lego fashion, and the total just happening to have that shape as the end result.

But it's really tempting to think of that shape of beard as having a kind of ethereal "blueprint" somewhere :)

Advertising makes money because it appeals to already-existing normal, average, etc., tendencies, which are driven in the first place by biology, the way the brain functions (again on average), and then secondarily by culture.

I wouldn't say the use business makes of all this has to do with psychology as a science, so much as with the "dark arts" of rhetoric, persuasion, hypnotism, etc. - i.e. the exploitation of glitches in human psychology, glitches that reveal our rationality to be an imperfect construction (or habit), with some flaws and gaps.

Doesn't the principle just fall out as a corollary of the infinite divisibility of length (or any other measurable relation)?

I wouldn't expect anything rational from these debates, the tail that's wagging the dog here is simply power-grabbing by insane ideologues. As an Alinskyite student once said, the issue is never the issue, it's just a pretext for undermining traditional social relations and ushering in a Communist revolution that will inevitably result in some sort of bloodbath, just as past attempts have always done. Any philosophy that comes from that process is bound to be (almost) complete word salad.

IOW, last year it's women, this year it's transgenders and now women are being thrown under the bus; last year it's Blacks, this year it's Mexicans and now Blacks are being thrown under the bus. It's all complete twaddle, and the movers and shakers don't believe a word of it. Only the useful idiot footsoldiers take it seriously - and they'll be first up against the wall come the revolution.

The most you can say is that there are two sexes and two genders, but since gender relates to manifest behaviour (behaviour that's like the typical or average or normal behaviour of either sex) it's possible to have any mixture of the two behaviour types that falls on a continuum anywhere between the two genders; but a given random position on the continuum is not its own gender, that would undermine the very concept of polar genders on which the idea of a continuum is based.

And of course there can be biological anomalies producing brains that don't sit happily with the sex they're born with. That's a difficult situation for which one obviously has sympathy, but it's just being used as the "Motte" pretext for the standard "Mottte & Bailey" tactic of the hard Left.

All humans have an equal basic moral status. They possess the same fundamental rights, and the comparable interests of each person should count the same in calculations that determine social policy. — Rank Amateur

Again, I completely disagree. There is no sense in which the interests of an impulsive, violent person can be treated as on the same level as the interests of someone who goes about their life thoughtfully, without doing harm. Society could not possibly function if that were taken seriously. The impulsive, violent person has less moral worth than the thoughtful, harmless person. They are of positive disvalue to humanity, to society, to those around them, etc., etc., and their interests are of less account (though under certain circumstances some of their interests may still be taken into account, see below - it's not like any human being, even the worst, is ever totally valueless, totally morally discountable).

There are two senses in which a kind of equality, in a sense, pertains to human beings, but neither of them have anything to do with morality (or rather, they aren't corollaries of the moral calculus per se).

1) The spiritual sense, as I mentioned. For Christians, for example, all human beings are "equal in the eyes of God", or for Jews, everyone is equally a "spark of the Divine." Most religious have something equivalent. In a secular context, that might be expressed in terms of "dignity", or proportionality, or in the expression of mercy and taking into account mitigating factors, or in the understanding that moral redemption may be possible for some. But this is DESPITE the obvious disparity in moral worth between people (it's something that under certain circumstances might override the normal moral calculus). And again, mercy and redemption are conditional on remorse being shown.

2) Equal treatment before the law. This is really a procedural function of how to go about ensuring social order: nobody gets any special privileges, everyone comes before the law as innocent until proven guilty, that sort of thing. There is a distal connection to morality here, in that, like every other human endeavour, the law must proceed morally (and prejudice is immoral). But it's not that the law is set up to enforce a particular view of morality. (This is a common mistake people make. The function of the law is not to promote morality, but to propagate social order; the connection with morality is simply that in doing so it must itself act within moral bounds.) And again, this proceeds DESPITE obvious moral differences.

P1: All human beings have equivalent moral value — Rank Amateur

No, they don't, that's absolute nonsense. A gangbanger, for example, does not have equivalent moral value to a normal human being who does no harm.

Perhaps you mean something like "spiritual value" or "value in the eyes of God" or something of that sort?

Energy implies and requires the pre-existence of space and time (energy being the capacity to do work, i.e. to alter some spatial configuration in time); it therefore cannot be something that pre-exists them.

That said, you might be interested in Christopher Langan's ToE. As with other "maverick" ToEs (like William James Sidis') he has something that's reminiscent of your "changing density" idea - e.g. that the "expansion" of the universe is only apparent, that something is conserved in some sense. The English occultist Aleister Crowley put it like this: "resolved images, dilated presentation." The symbol of Ouroboros (snake eating its tail) probably represents archaic intuitions along these lines.

The question has two parts, the idea of transition from nothing to being, and the idea that nothing somehow seems more like what you'd expect, and being stands out like a sore thumb, something requiring explanation against that expected outcome.

I think the question of being is something that doesn't actually strike everyone. Some people, I've observed, just don't have an ear for it, it just doesn't even strike them as a question. But to others, it's a really weird thought - why is there anything at all?

Savour it, roll it around in your mind, and it just gets weirder and weirder.

The question is really the root thought of all religion and mysticism, as well as philosophy. But it sometimes gets discussed by people to whom it has never actually occurred natively, it's just something they've read about, that hasn't yet struck them fully and properly, as a live puzzle, rooting them to the spot in amazement.

Normal is basically just average or common with regard to a particular group. For example, heterosexuality is normal because most people are in fact heterosexual.

It's not really a concept that ought to cause any confusion, but I think sometimes people confuse normal with normative, and then take either a boo or hooray stance wrt their own confused concept.

Yeah I think it's two things overlapping. Sociality sets the stage for the development of intelligence, but perhaps with the neural mechanisms that make for intelligence, beyond a certain point other factors take over to make super-high intelligence out of balance with other factors.

Like, suppose intelligence evolved to require the co-operation of A, B, C, D, E genes, with the total contributing to intelligence level, and the set being roughly in balance with most people, but then suppose in some people the E factor is much more heavily weighted than the other factors. That would produce a super-high intelligence. But what if the E factor happens to clash with other aspects of the total personality, making the person inhibited or socially inept?

Another possibility: human beings and animals generally are like these Heath Robinson contraptions, stuck together with duck tape, sticks and glue, that "pass muster" in the circumstances they evolved in for the bulk of their evolution, but don't necessarily function so well outside those conditions. For example sociality in our ancestral environment would have meant knowing, say, about 20 people quite well, and half a dozen really well. What happens when a creature designed for that type of environment is rammed cheek by jowl with millions of strangers in a modern conurbation? Maybe they withdraw into themselves, or whatever.

Lots of possibilities here, of course one would have to know the science and investigate to figure out what's really going on.