But I question the idea that information is constitutive or foundational of matter. — Wayfarer

I guess this makes more sense, respecting a general definition. Information must inform, but the whole world is there waiting to inform us about itself. The sense data which becomes an impression and is used by an agent toward some end (ie. attention, recall, association...) is information (?).

Information:

1) facts provided or learned about something or someone

2) what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things

Science doesn't ultimately explain what all this is. It just leverages knowledge about things to do other things people need or want at some cost.

We are still left with why any of this is occurring (or not). This is not a question that can be satisfactorily answered. The impulse to ask this kind of why is no different than the impulse to pull God out of a hat to justify or explain. We've inherited ways to do things, just like we've inherited being, just as some folks have inherited God as a reason for x, y or z.

Science does enlarge the universe though which helps us to change what we can to benefit human beings (relatively speaking).

God seems to be a sort of an inherited case of ideas (a bit conservative) about embodiment of law/order that governs human or cosmic action.

So what if unchecked information processing actually causes our extinction? This would be a case of fulfilling purpose in the short term while forgoing even more in the future (relative to some species point of view).

Is there any inherent difference in human (anthropocentric) processing of information (as if we had free will to do anything else) and the kind that occurs in the natural world for slime mold, trees and colliding galaxies?

Not God was a grilled cheese sandwhich eaten in a New York diner on August 24, 1982. But what was the name of the diner? Who served it? Will it appear again?

Does anyone have more information about what caused the grilled cheese, so that I might predict the next one?

This is a grotesque procategorization comparable in value to a prosent life.

Since there is no meaning except where it is forced by the inviolence of being here rather than there, by a perception of chimpery in piggery, per the dictates of viewing by ex homo cerebrum, it comes to the denial of pork as homo that will save us from having to abstain from seeing bacon as ourselves, a kind of soylent green porcine-homo. Homo labors to consume pork alone, for it is in the tasting of ourselves as its own denial in total ignorance, that sustains homo's creative, innovative depravity. The naivety of being a cannibal is what enables being as being itself a being in beingness. We must deny our own forlorn incarceration as bacon to wake up to taste the bacon in bliss.

At once we cannot deny the pig in man, but by knowing the fateful historicity of chimp on pig, all will be lost in a utter foundness. It is as momentous as the death of God, and will recause the attitudes of dispair so typical of all centuries. The influx of nausea in the perception of homo as pig will be existentially intolerable. It is the invariable cause of the opiate and Netflix epidemic. To see our inner pig as oursleves is to wish to unbee in anesthete and teevee.

Cheers though, how's your sex life going? Mine is well you know by now ... — Wallows

None existent, unless simulacra counts.

Everybody is wallowing in something. The trick is to be in some kind of flow where you're relieved of being aware of it. A different kind of sleep.

You maybe lonely, Wallows.

Do you have enough strength to climb a wall? Imagine yourself in one of those silly climbing gyms, with faux rock wall, little ledges to hold on to, a professional safety rig. We'll race to the top but I'll hold back. I don't race but I can pretend to.

Then we'll go out and get you one of those real classy sex massage therapists, to wallow with you in a nice clean bed, to strum on the knot of being who you are. Unless that is grotesque. Then no.

Every act might be empty of a fullness of normality, but oh well. Staring at the curtains is as fulfilling as reading threads at this point.

More pig chimp content please.

Father
Bearing on his crown a spinning wheel of glowing gold,
Boring into his mind's eye
Bleeding from his temples

The gift of the waters in four directions.

Whilst Mother
Bearing in her womb
Father's own replacement
Heaved in pains of labor,
Bleeding forth the oceans,

The gift of the waters in four directions.

Brother,
Pained to see the wheel spinning on his aging Father's head,
Was struck by the wounded world and its costly gifts,
Crying loudly against it all:

This wheel is not for me.
This wheel is not for me.
This wheel is not for me.
This wheel is not for me.

And a voice spoke out
From nowhere and everywhere at once.

Who is the wheel for if not for thee?

Ask your therapist who ought to wear the clown nose (you will inevitably bring with you) in your next session.

Meanwhile, work on your balloon animal, juggling and tight-rope walking skills, with or without simultaneously smoking clove cigarettes.

Eggs. They are fundamental feature of keeping this absurd show going.

Symbolizing the enigma of the cycle of life since the the dawning of sense. Eggs, bunnies and flowers in spring, a depraved consequence of gratuitous and unchecked sexual solicitation and communion.

Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Eat them before then!

The mythic pheonix is really just a chicken whose eggs are taken for raising before it gets roasted.

There are some amazingly robust and underutilized food producing organisms out there that could add energy efficient nutritional value to processed products.

Moringa oleifera (called the Miracle Tree) grows in semi-arid locations of sub-tropics/tropics. Leaves from this tree provide a mineral rich complete protein to supplement a calorie source. Seeds also provide cooking oil.

Gram for gram comparison of Moringa leaf to other sources of nutrition:

2x the protein of yogurt
4x vitamin A of carrots
3x the potassium of bananas
4x the calcium of milk
7x vitamin C of oranges ( info from kulikulifoods.com)

I'm also ready to eat insects.

Horses by Pablo Neruda

From the window I saw the horses.

I was in Berlin, in winter. The light
had no light, the sky had no heaven.

The air was white like wet bread.

And from my window a vacant arena,
bitten by the teeth of winter.

Suddenly driven out by a man,
ten horses surged through the mist.

Like waves of fire, they flared forward
and to my eyes filled the whole world,
empty till then. Perfect, ablaze,
they were like ten gods with pure white hoofs,
with manes like a dream of salt.

Their rumps were worlds and oranges.

Their color was honey, amber, fire.

Their necks were towers
cut from the stone of pride,
and behind their transparent eyes
energy raged, like a prisoner.

There, in silence, at mid-day,
in that dirty, disordered winter,
those intense horses were the blood
the rhythm, the inciting treasure of life.

I looked. I looked and was reborn:
for there, unknowing, was the fountain,
the dance of gold, heaven
and the fire that lives in beauty.

I have forgotten that dark Berlin winter.

I will not forget the light of the horses.

Emily Dickinson's I Died for Beauty

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth - the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

Hope you had a giggle. — Wallows

I'm somewhat serious about the scenario. It's not funny at all.

I too am Wallows (any Wallows), and I will raise him by raising myself.

Hypothetical Scenario:

A newborn baby miraculously appears in Wallows room, with a notarized birth certificate legally confirming that Wallows is the biological father of a miracle ( a child from nowhere). Wallows also knows somehow by intuition that he is this child (this will be a reincarnation of Wallows).

Given the Wallows of habit, given that Wallows likely knows himself by some measure, does Wallows raise the child as his own or does he file for adoption? What is the compassionate thing to do?

No one denies that survivable fertile offspring from inter-order hybridization is, if possible at all, very, very improbable and rare.

So, sorry there aren't more instances of evidence. — Michael Ossipoff

Therefore the theory being right is highly improbable.

Try a less controversial thread in a science forum.

What is the evidence of inter-ordinal hybridization in nature. Pose question to relevant forum. Do not mention pig chimp sexual relations. Do not mention McCarthy.

Not sure how to understand what is being asked.

Discord, dissension, strife, conflict might just as well be causes of temporary unity. To identify and sacrifice for an identity by sharing attributes, hardships, memories, experiences, culture, desires, beliefs et cetera, is as much cause of unity as disunity. A union requires existential conditions for its unity, whether emerging from natural states (self-organizing structures) or careful human deliberation.

Eating and drinking is a universal necessity among a lot of species. So maybe the recognition of this fact of survival has the potential to unify. But the belief as to what one ought to eat may separate us as much as it unifies.

That which by belief requires a conservation of its union must work to protect that union.

Life unifies by dissembling itself. Life eats life.

Pigs have gestational periods of 114 days.
Chimps have gestational periods of 243 days.

So how long was the gestational period of the pig that was impregnated by a chimpanzee?

Here is just one developmental incongruity (among many others) that has to be overcome to support chimpig origins.

It seems that whether the sperm and egg of two vastly unrelated mammalian species can fuse at all is an interesting question and an experiment that is likely to have been done in a petri dish.

The Ape Shit Linguist
Languishes on.

Behold the wearying locutions of your letters, sand grains texturing wordy landscapes.

Read the desert stretch of your sentences as miles of my ersatz grief.

For crap sake, shut up!

The buffoonery of your babble
Of bullshit, in blasting heat or brittling cold, does not console me.

Mirages of a quiet hope gleam on the horizon.

The sea is the same, fathoms full of salty tears.

Butt also... (not "but also")

Lucky comforted on our motoring mounts, ships and caravans, skin upholstered arm chairs.

Ride on Lucky,
Ride on...

For the ass is sore and Sophia is snoring...

Awake Sophia!

Awake fragile pigeon of my heart. I seek thy company, to distract me from my mind troubles and the void of the desert.

You're supposed to post poetry in the Lounge.

This is absolutely ridiculous.

but some people think that memes spread because they are useful to the person or people that it exists in....this doesn't necessarily follow. — wax

There is a trade-off continuum in any ecology whereby there are interacting agents (memes, genes, agents) that are classifiable as (a) symbionts (b) commensals (c) parasites relative to one another.

This is just borrowing from the way some evolutionary biologists talk about relationships between organisms in an ecology. There is the possibility that ideas are parasitical in the way of being great replicators, always relative to an ecology or landscape which is an mosaic of replicating patterns (Darwinian agents), all interacting with one another. Dennett gives the example of a religious faith (ideas) perpetuating a cycle of suicide bombing as a parasitical meme. It maybe serving an institution which is helped to replicate by it, which is yet another construct made of agents.

It's definitely a weird way of looking at things and I'm not sure its very useful. How far can the analogy be carried and what work can it do (if any work at all)?

It's agents (replicators) all the way down in an infinite regress, even as you come to natural, stable, recurring patterns that constitute the substrate in which any Darwinian process can or is likely to occur. This is pushing the speculative possibility of Universal Darwinism (natural selection processes in non-biological domains).

Whose "memes" are priming our notion of the "meme meme"? Universal Darwinism is scary (but this is just a meme).

A passage from Dennett's 1995 book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, on The Philosophical Importance of Memes:

Our normal view of ideas is also a normative view: it embodies a cannon or an ideal about which ideas we ought to accept or admire or approve of. In brief, we ought to accept the true and the beautiful. According to the normal view, the following are virtual tautologies -- trivial truths not worth the ink to write them down:

Idea X was believed by the people because X was deemed to true.

People approved of X because people found X to be beautiful.

These norms are not just dead obvious, they are constitutive: they set the rules whereby we think about ideas. We require explanations only when there are deviations from these norms. Nobody has to explain why a book purports to be full of true sentences, or why an artist might strive to make something beautiful -- it just "stands to reason." The constitutive status of these norms grounds the air of paradox in such aberrations as "The Metropolitan Museum of Banalities" or "The Encyclopedia of Falsehoods." What requires a special explanation in the normal view are the cases in which despite the truth of beauty of an idea it is not accepted, or despite its ugliness or falsehood it is:

The meme's-eye view purports to be an alternative to this normal perspective. What is tautological for it is:

Meme X spread among the people because X is a good replicator. — Dennett, pg. 363

Zhuangzi was day dreaming again. On reflection of a reading someone's dream, he wondered if he could be other than just Zhuangzi, whether he could've been:

The Farmer
The Farmer's Son
The Farmer's Wife
The Farmer's Daughter
A Self-aware Sunflower
A Talking Butterfly

He then surmised that his vision of being in the story best related to the free perspective of a butterfly. He had been above the rows of corn and saw the neighboring sunflower fields. He had evaded by chance the flying pebbles thrown by the farmer's son. He saw the farmer's wife hanging laundry out to dry. He sat on a giant golden disk which he hallucinated to appear ultraviolet and sipped sweetness from its neon florets. At any moment he could rise above, to leave the scene by his will toward some other sweetness.

Zhuangzi feel asleep again after too much yellow wine and found himself to be senseless, enrobed lightly in something like carpet or a sheet, shutting out light and sound. All apertures of sense where covered and he could only guess as to what he was and where he was and why. He counted his breaths to pass the time and wondered how he had learn to count, or whether he was really breathing. He tried to exercise that former will that allowed him to rise above the golden fields but there was no point in taking flight in total darkness. The only way out would be again to wait, to sleep to wake, to dream about the floating vertigo of being other than Zhuangzi.

As such, how can we say that life is any different than death? — simmerdown

This is interesting insofar there is only the state of being (self-aware experience). After I am dead the only prospect there is is being again in time. There is no necessary link between beings after death or before birth.

One could say there is no sure finality to being, if all there is the experience (in any way) of being in time.

Death is a consolation to the possible eternity of discontinuous beings in time.

Or this is possibly decorative word smithing.

So if being eternal is scary because you are having an unpleasant time, don't worry, you're going to die, then there could be something like a mammalian bat for a short time (if there is anything it is like to be a bat). It's a lottery behind a veil of injustice, where you get ejected into being that is a burden for itself... improbably. (An attempt at humor...)

The Unease of Unreality with Loneliness and Depression

Relativistic nihilism is a giant iron planet that causes a relativity well, sucking down the stupid mosaic of self and dispersing it like a jig saw puzzle. The sides are so steep that you have to develop a mechanism (McGyver it) for getting out by coordinating parts of the stupid self mosaic. One foot on side G, hand on ledge Q, coordinate on axis N. Where have my balls gone? Did I ever have balls? Are they the causal agents of courage?

It's as easy as getting in front of others, trying something new. It's as easy not believing what you believe (as a practice). It's as easy as forcing yourself to get out of bed when you might as well be dead. It's as easy as getting hemodialysis if your kidneys are failing (mine are not). It's as easy speaking a comforting narrative. It's as easy as doing an hour of more of Yoga everyday for the rest of your life. It's as easy exposure therapy to what you fear.

There are people to love in exchange for what is worth loving, somewhere, by visions of memory. There are strangers to befriend beyond fear, if a mind can imagine it. There are friends to be bought in desperation (and whores to be adored by strange love).

The Poet's Wish

Always sew irony into the ends of a procreative wish.

The poet spoke (trembling with desire for an epidemic resurrection of a classic order) into the netted abyss. Another sent a probe.

What came back first was a trickle, then a flow, then a torrential mixture of brutalizing elements: the globe itself came in force, shattering to the poet's call.

Waves of liquefied clay poured through the valleys carrying forth the macerated bodies of post-postmodern poets and other mediocre indiscernibles, plastic bags, foam, tires, bottles, broken bits of lumber, swirling in untidy currents around the poet's life boat.

Vast collections of unread poetry, soaked, churned and remade, rendered back to him his wishes in a mass slurry of a newly naturalized and fluid gibberish.

And there were no walls to stop the floods of babble.

There were boats to float above the floods of babble.


_________________

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three bodies in a tub,
And who do you think they be?
Anyone and everyone
And all of them out to sea.

Assume it has happened before and it will happen again.

If there is nothing it is like to be dead or asleep, there is bound to be a another self-aware substitute inquirer with an inquiry, even if what is doing the inquiring is a non-biological replicator or an arachnid prince, pauper or a sleepwalker.

Why should this state of being be statistically impossible? This is likely the only kind of state that is possible, which is to say that all states of being are reductively equivalent in terms of "being" at all.

I just don't get the "schizophrenic" obsession with people who can put on different personalities and entertain people. — Wallows

Doesn't society require us to "act" all the time. I have to maintain a certain limited persona in front of my boss or else risk the likelihood of being fired. Here we have to play at being a philosopher, if we are not sufficiently educated as to know what a "proper response" entails and what kinds of questions are permitted or not. If I start dressing as a clown for work interactions, maybe no one will care... but I'm not going to do that empirical test, even though I day dream about it now and then.

Every domain presents a range of options for persona alteration.

Think about the way you might talk to your mother is entirely different from the way you might talk to your friend or anyone else for that matter. This could be viewed as compartmentalization of personas, that you want your "character" to be perceived properly with regard to others by intent.

"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players..."

Beginning to some part of As you Like It by William Shakespeare.

For those too lazy to wiki:

A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence.[1] Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized but not defined by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.

A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence.[1] Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized but not defined by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.[2]

Rituals are a feature of all known human societies.[3] They include not only the worship rites and sacraments of organized religions and cults, but also rites of passage, atonement and purification rites, oaths of allegiance, dedication ceremonies, coming of age ceremony or rites, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages and funerals, school "rush" traditions and graduations, club meetings, sporting events, Halloween parties, veterans parades, Christmas shopping and more. Many activities that are ostensibly performed for concrete purposes, such as jury trials, execution of criminals, and scientific symposia,[citation needed] are loaded with purely symbolic actions prescribed by regulations or tradition, and thus partly ritualistic in nature. Even common actions like hand-shaking and saying "hello" may be termed rituals.

The field of ritual studies has seen a number of conflicting definitions of the term. One given by Kyriakidis is that a ritual is an outsider's or "etic" category for a set activity (or set of actions) that, to the outsider, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical. The term can be used also by the insider or "emic" performer as an acknowledgement that this activity can be seen as such by the uninitiated onlooker.[4]

In psychology, the term ritual is sometimes used in a technical sense for a repetitive behavior systematically used by a person to neutralize or prevent anxiety; it is a symptom of obsessive–compulsive disorder. — Wikipedia: Ritual

I don't follow any rituals nor do I encourage them because I actually don't know if God exists or not. — TheMadFool

Would you reconsider the belief that you "don't follow any rituals" given that what is or is not a ritual is possibly a culturally relative distinction.

"There is a rock, but no one is there to perceive it, because we all died an hour previously.

Is there a rock? Yes or no?"

What disease causes someone to ask such questions? Or is this a sign of health?

Mircea Eliade (scholar of myth) relates some ritual performance of our forebears as a means to sustain creation itself. There is more to this point of view than what the conventional secular dismissal permits.

What does commuting every morning from the suburbs to the city, in fuming congestion sustain? And why is it not a ritual? Because riding in a car is miscategorized as a non-ritual, non-religious, secular perodicity. You are not riding to church... and the world as a whole is not a sacred place. Your lover is a bag of blood, bones and shit, and if his/her face accidentally unbecomes itself, then something else may change.

"There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle." Albert Eeinstein (did Eeinstein say this?)

The ritual of the anti-miracle is one of disenchantment. For example, the ritual of demonstrating "free will" is on going somewhere close by.

See pantheism or panentheism.

There is also something like the soul of the universe, common to all beings, called Atman (check this out) in Vedanta myth.

Currently the notion of a fractal universe (or holographic) impresses me as a possibility, where smaller fractions contain the same information (or pattern) as the whole.

Others, inversely, believed that it was fundamental to eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons (rooms of books), showed credentials that were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves: their hygienic, ascetic furor caused the senseless perdition of millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those who deplore the "treasures" destroyed by this frenzy neglect two notable facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or comma. — J.L. Borges, The Library of Babel

And then there will be no more humans whinging about the misery of existence. — Bitter Crank

Are you an antiwhingilist?

Suppose that the best way to hasten the extinction our species is actually to increase reproduction rates of our species and therefore to generate excitement for pronatal narratives.

There could be some calculus by which increased suffering of a mass of lives in the short term warrants a quickening of the end of life in the long term.

Antinatalists unite! We must pass out pronatal propaganda!

In the same way people from India then to be less materialistic and more conformististic because they believe in the law of Karma. — pbxman

That is to say people from Buddhist countries tend to be more submissive and prone to change the inside than the outside. — pbxman

I don't agree. This seems like an unsubstantiated claim. — Tzeentch

Karma is quite an insidious, slippery and engimatic concept because it can be interpreted in contradictory ways. Any material success might be interpreted as a status indicator of good Karma by some Indians today. The notion of Karma might have been used to sustain the caste system but whether this is good or bad is relative to point of view.

In some sense you can't be held responsible for your Karma if Karma is responsible for your inability to carry out right action. A systematic interpretation of Karma might be an insidious deception of Karma. Ugh...

Is there a better interpretation of Karma?

you'd never know with certainty, but that's a truism about empirical claims period. — Terrapin Station

Are there non-empirical claims we can know for certain by way of proofs that do not rely on empirical claims? Sorry if this does not make sense.

Are all claims either directly or indirectly dependent on empirical observations? And is this also a truism?