• Top Hybridization-Geneticist suggests we're a Pig-Chimp Hybrid.
    This is absolutely ridiculous.
  • What is a meme?
    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).
  • What is a meme?
    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
  • The Sunflower And The Butterfly
    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.
  • Is everything inconsequential?
    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...)
  • What's grinding your gears?
    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).
  • Get Creative!
    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.
  • Endings
    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.
  • On 'Acting'
    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.
  • The God of Creation vs the God of Rituals
    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.
  • The Doctor
    "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?
  • The God of Creation vs the God of Rituals
    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.
  • The God of Creation vs the God of Rituals
    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.
  • The Very Hungry Caterpillar

    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

  • It is life itself that we can all unite against
    And then there will be no more humans whinging about the misery of existence. — Bitter Crank

    Are you an antiwhingilist?
  • It is life itself that we can all unite against
    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!
  • Buddhism to Change the World
    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?
  • Total Recall - Voluntary Ignorance Paradox
    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?
  • There is No Actual Profit Gained by Business Activity
    Are you positing a dramatic increase in testicle size and/or sperm production to account for this population growth? — Bloginton Blakely

    No, just the fact of sexual reproduction alone is enough to account for population growth. If we just got rid of men there might be less problems you ascribe to business. (This is silly)

    Business is the action of creating and trading property usually for the purpose of generating an alleged surplus. — Bloginton Blakley

    It could be about trading property to maintain life. An alleged surplus might be relative to what one needs or wants.
  • There is No Actual Profit Gained by Business Activity
    The needs of business created the large human population we have. — Bloginton Blakley

    It could have just as well been the needs of men that created our large human population. Maybe testicles are actually responsible for the human population.

    What is business anyway? And what isn't business? Please tell us in so many words.
  • The Very Hungry Caterpillar
    I don't eat or sleep properly - I haven't eaten all day until just now, for instance - I have terrible memory, and I often act like a sociopath or someone with Asperger's. There are some basic day-to-day stuff that I've just stopped doing, which leads to problems. I'm not communicating with people in my life as I'm expected to. I'm barely coping. All of this is causing big problems for me. I'm not entirely sure what's wrong with me. It's obviously something, even if it doesn't have a name like you get with a mental disorder. Some of this sociopath stuff fits. I got my job through superficial charm, and I use it on customers, but the people I work with have clocked on that I'm a robot, and they expect me to be like them all of the time and not stand there being unsociable, which is difficult and draining. My job requires me to be an actor on different levels almost at all times.

    But there's always a bright side, I suppose. This pizza I'm eating right now tastes good.     — S
  • The Very Hungry Caterpillar
    Jesus, S. Are you inflamed this morning.
  • Sign conversation example (argued to be greater than word)
    This could just as well be about the pleasure of charades in some non-conventional format.

    S + rattle =

    :naughty: :strong: :down:

    :nerd: :fire: :heart:

    Axe + Tree =
  • Another Universal Language and its Usage
    And, as mentioned in the synopsis, I made my little attempt at such categorisation and am curious to know if the result of my attempt, the list, could make sense to other people since it perfectly makes sense to me. — Eseitch

    Could you explain a bit more about your categorization (typology) in your link. What are the details of the method (algorithm) by which you assign a name under (i)Angel (ii)Demon (iii)Great in a grouping of 3. Are the grouped names refuting major points? Are they voices in a dialogue? Does the Great tag represent a synthesis or mediation of content associated with the preceding 2 names?
  • The Reptilian Conspiracy Theory vs Buddhism
    Mythic narrative is always an interpretation which can be re-translated into acceptable or unacceptable (contemporary, historical, fantastical) terms.

    "Soma Sema" was said to be a gnostic meme.

    It translates to the "The body is a prison" (maybe "body prison", or "body tomb"). Double check, I'm terrified of being wrong.

    This is a seed (existential attitude) for story which could portray a perfectly reasonable and contemporary setting.

    Sisyphus roles a rock up a hill, only to have it fall down again. Who is making Sisyphus role the rock of the hill? Possibly aliens (those who manipulated those who ordered those who hold S. to the grind). Or maybe the rock that is rolling is the burden of maintaining the body itself... that being, becoming is some kind of absurd work.

    It is important to look for many ways in which a myth (metaphor) reveals truth, even though it could have been stated in more serious terms: "The rat race is not a race for rats." Get your facts straight.
  • The Oxytocin puzzle
    What about if we can't make a clean cut between good and bad, presuming that they're both caused by a single biochemical? — TheMadFool

    We've all heard that correlation is not causation.

    A kind of emotional preference or attachment is somehow correlated with oxytocin levels. As to the specific nature of that preference, a tremendous range of other complicating factors are in play.

    Strong attachment might naturally necessitate a strong discrimination towards what threatens to obstruct or dissolve that attachment. We protect what we love but whether it is moral to protect what we love is a question? Are we free to love whom we love?

    Case in point, how might oxytocin play a role in a preference for treating pet animals well (by law) while ignoring other kinds of animal abuse (industrial meat and egg production). Dogs might make pretty good dog burgers... Except, we love Lassie. Lassie is part of the family... Who are you eating, Lassie?

    Might be interesting to look up cases of oxytocin deficiency. Oxytocin plays a role in empathy and facial recognition (Oh, Sarah, you look so happy this morning, Oh poochy pooch, your doggie smile fills me with sweetness).
  • The Oxytocin puzzle


    Doesn't quite touch the study cited in the OP but still interesting.

    The two-fold behavioral effect of oxytocin might make sense with regard to caring for young from the stand point of being a mother. A mother is attached to young and therefore becomes more discerning or preferential. It might benefit her to distrust out-group members to protect her young.

    "Hate" is probably too strong a word to assign to these effects of oxytocin on human preference between in-group versus out-group members.

    Edit: Actually this is interesting as regards 'attachment as a cause of unnecessary suffering' philosophic frame.
  • The unavoidable dangers of belief and believers responsibility of the dangers
    Religion as passively accepted faith (inherited lifestyle) is not something one might necessarily choose. It happens to you as a consequence of cultural pressure or personal revelation.

    If you are born in some Mormon family, love or respect could be conditional upon accepting certain ways of doing things. You don't really need believe at all. You just need to act as if you believe, follow rules, otherwise you get exiled (let go).

    Some Muslim households will even kill their children if they have transgressed an interpretation of religious law.

    Religious belief is an empty justification for doing as you do, sometimes at great social cost.

    It is only because of different competing values, by which society is ordered, that religious beliefs are registered as dangerous, or harmful.

    It might be universally desirable to do no harm if we have the choice but a sense of "having the choice" might itself be a belief that is gifted to us and that we think we ought to gift to others.

    The gift of free thought surely permits us to advocate for the devil in the same way God would advocate for his believers, by appeal to choice or fate.
  • Cream
    Is our sense of meaning and value in a meaningless world/universe as much of an illusion as something induced by this "cream? Like if you have a pill that would give you a sense of meaning in your life, how is that different from if you invent a meaning to your life when there isn't any external meaning at all? Where is the illusion of meaning and where is the actual meaning? — Christoffer

    I just re-watched Tarkovsky's "masterpiece", Stalker. It provides nearly the same premise, as the wish-fulfilling Zone corresponds well to David Firth's Cream but is beautifully rendered (though long and meditative) as moving toward a point in space. A more recent film is also a Annihilation, which could be a curious derivative of Stalker (moving toward a point of different kind of annihilation, or revaluation of life). You might like to check them out to help extract more inspiration for working toward the philosophy of the subject.

    What appears at first inquiry (curiosity or replusion) becomes on closer inspection a self-transforming or self-identifying paradox (like cream), as if we do not really understand the consequences of our own deep desiring nature (the desire to know the truth, to be or achieve XYZ, the effects of cream on interpreting our desire).

    There is a scary aspect to the affirmation or belief that there is no non-human meaning, no transcendent God that is not a projection of our own being in its blind, primordial desire. Cold relativity and the unboundedness of being becomes quite stark. This is possibly what those who associate with nihilism and existentialism dream about, the absence of anything beyond the folly of our species (as ourselves), and associated feeling of despair ("this is it, the grind, sleeping and eating, it is what it is, et cetera). The more we realize the mutability and temporality of our experience the more we might realize how empty (or full) our own current state is.
  • Three Bad Ways Of Replying
    Pretend you are being charged by the word. — Bitter Crank

    I ought to vow ABSOLUTE SILENCE on that account. (9 pennies).

    And if time is also money... (5 pennies + y seconds)

    (Parenthetically closed words ought to be charged at a different rate)
  • Three Bad Ways Of Replying
    1. A reply which doesn't make proper use of the quote function.
    2. A reply which is too lengthy.
    3. A reply which doesn't make proper use of the quote function and is too lengthy.     — S

    4. If you can't follow these S rules and thus by habit become associated with what is S "bad", you can still post in the Lounge.

    Just make sure you poke S with a stick now and then.
  • Cream
    This probably belongs in the Lounge, since no work has been done to answer your own question besides what one might extrapolate from the video you presented (someone else's work).

    How would we view ourselves as human beings? — Christoffer

    My opinion is that desired properties of cream as presented (fixing anything that easily) would have destroyed human life long before a business cabal would've put a quash on it. That destruction might have taken the form of everyone evaporating into light (which could as well be a metaphor for death: a radical change from state A as a known state to state Z an unknown state).

    There is a lot in that video that is hard to parse (to go from metaphor to whatever the manifold formal arguments and well worn questions might entail). Pick an aspect, write an essay, then argue points. You have to do it in the standardized way or else no one is interested.

    The real cream is probably a symbol for the totality of life (the slime that weaves the whole dynamic web). Death is what dissembles that may provide avenues for new adaptations. The death of an individual is a little death but he, she, it lives on by others who are all supported by the total system. Any severe disturbance like cream might upset the balance in such a way as to eliminate humans in one fell swoop (that is just saying what the film presents to us). Cream would seep on though, facilitating whatever wills itself to continue, if there is such thing as will ( maybe a property of continuity that the cream responds to) inherent to any non-human creature.

    Edit: Cream could likely be a metaphor for any technological application that radically alters the total system and the necessary politics required to conserve or progress a desirable type of life (family, community, nation, world) using some kind of cost and benefit analysis.

    "If you are going to allow technologies into the market place that destroy people's jobs, it is your responsibility to find a way of replacing those jobs, or compensating those people." This is a line from Brian Cox on Joe Rogan's podcast talking about the social and economic costs of replacing middle class jobs with AI technologies. Worth thinking about.
  • The Dozen Locker Dilemma
    Oh boy, is that a mistake! Reality is subject to entropy - which means the easy road leads ever downward unto stagnation and death. Everything good is uphill, and going uphill requires effort. We need to expend energy just to stand still - or we fall apart. It's an absolute physical law. — karl stone

    Ain't nothing wrong with falling apart but I want to believe the principle that it is absolutely good to endure as along as possible. The energy used to go uphill causes other things to do downhill.

    The unusual perturbation of global weather due to burning stored energy to go up hill will cause some things elsewhere (life) to fall apart (go down hill). China absorbs the pollution of global consumption. The horizon of a local arboretum is contaminated with windmills. Once thriving fertile grounds turn to desert. Mosquitos carrying malaria (the biggest killer of all time) expand their territories. Then we try to adapt, still at cost of future adaptation.

    My parents both worked full time jobs. My father was next to non-existent (like his father before him). My brother was a mean bastard who believes himself to be a victim (possibly rightly of being unloved and emotionally abused). He was the most successful of the progeny, who severed relations to his family.

    In 6 grade I put on a puppet play about suicide. The hero (Superbunny) tried to save someone who jumped off Niagra falls but was moments too late. My teacher was disgusted, I then became target for a few occasions of class humilation ("this is an example of what not to do"). My friend, who played the hero puppet, was an ostracized kid whose family situation terrified me. He was being supported by his Stepmother (father missing) one got the impression that she'd love to be rid of him. If I was in his place I didn't think I'd be able to cope.

    I feel myself to be alone in the universe, sometime amidst people I love. But maybe by a measure of action (of doing) it can be said that I don't love anyone. I can't call my indifference a type of love.

    I believe in the power of Metta (love and compassion practice). We could have been anyone. We could have been the placid cow, chewing cud, enraptured in bliss, or the cow seized with existential fear before the gate of an abattoir. Or we could have been stuck in a cattle car headed to a concentration camp, separated from mother and father. Mother might have had to choose whom to leave behind.

    We should try to treat people well. Vile nihlistic children, puerile hellions seeking the flame annhiliation, and ornery wearied masters seeking five star accommodations. All will be invited to be. They have been.
  • Musings of a failed Stoic.
    Doesn't Buddha kind of represent the ultimate stoic.

    Thought or feeling for him would not be a problem given an austere regime for training for equanimity in chaos.

    Stoicism would likely involve training oneself not just by Wallowing (the limiting cycles of your activity and responsibilities), but by enduring what isn't necessary to endure. Taleb's concept of antifragility might be useful here. Someone who voluntarily endures what they normally avoid is better equipped to handle the unsuspected unpleasant. Common sense?
  • The Dozen Locker Dilemma
    Is the Taj Mahal a locker?

    A place to store memory of your loved ones.

  • Dangerous Knowledge
    ↪TheMadFool


    Given your name, TheMadFool, you might be projecting a secret wish, unless you know something that is twisting your noodle into an odd shape. Soon to be TheSaneGenius, I hope.

    Most geniuses probably weren't mad. It was the inability of the folks around them to understand them that likely drives psychological illness. What you think others think of you can cause great stress. If everyone withdraws and you lose your social status and income, are threatened with the rack and thumb screws, then yeah, insanity might be quite natural.

    A lot of contemporary illness is induced by existential distress (paralyzing fear) and the inability to moderate one's lifestyle (food, physical activity, social needs). Most time is spent working for shit income in the dumb rat race, with little left over to cultivate the self. Society doesn't give a lick about the mad or the so-called unspecialized "normal" apes.
  • Dangerous Knowledge
    This expression "dangerous knowledge" is like a flag on the peak of a mountain. The unclaimed mountain could be a metaphor for an entire world from a point of view (transpose the flag to the surface of the Moon or Mars).

    It might be comparable to "dangerous experience." Why would anyone want to physically go to Mars? They might actually believe they are living in a simulation (remarkable!). From risk-averse life-affirming position, it seems irrational. For a lot of folks life is so absurd as to render the rational as a kind of valuation about what folks believe is rational. When someone says, 'such and such is irrational' is probably a valuation (judgment) never a truth. If rational is x, then...

    We presume "philosophy" is worthwhile because of conserved memes (inherited or copied beliefs). Someone once said "an unexamined life is not worth living". This has somehow been conserved in relation to the projected value of the works associated with the man who said "an examined life is not worth living". Many many many men and women ask themselves daily, "is this life worth living." For some it is just a terrible feeling, pain, for what they see is necessary to avoid death. If only they had some "dangerous knowledge" that might undo what they believe is necessary.

    If you take a random sample of 100 people and lock them up in solitary confinement for 1 year, what % of those people will have taken their own lives (by what curious speciic means)? What % of those people will have had revelation about the value of some better orientation life? What % will be unchanged, neither positively or negatively affected? If this was law in some society, what behavioral effect might it have in that society?

    "Dangerous knowledge!" Whoa! What a meme this is.

    Put a box in your child's room that says "Dangerous, do not open!" and see what happens. Put a tree in the garden of Fleabin with a sign that says "This tree is poisonous, do not eat its fruits." You never know until you try, unless you already know because someone has tried.
  • How should Christians Treat animals?
    Christianity ideally ties one to vegetarianism, with eggs and milk coming from humanely raised animals who aren't slaughtered after giving up their usefulness. — NKBJ

    (Not addressed to NKBJ but to All)

    From a practical standpoint, finding milk from animals that aren't going to be slaughtered is not easy. My boss warns against red meat as "bad news" (Vedanta related ethics) but he sure loves his market bought cows milk and butter, which nonetheless is a byproduct of a grim process of separating babies from their mothers, both of which go to slaughter.

    Lots of folks of older cultures gave ritualistic thanks to the meaningful sacrifice of animals, especially because that sacrifice was a necessary condition of survival. The Ainu of Japan used to raise bears as pets for a while, treated them as a member of the family, then slaughtered them with great piety (or so I read).

    Meat consumption has a ripple of measurable effects on the global ecosystem but so do vegetables (see corn, cotten, soy and oil palm). Growing food at scale is an existentially nasty, ethically questionable, but necessary business. Collateral damage includes poisoning folks with chemicals and animal feces (see hog farming in Southern regions of U.S.) One might want to frame the ethics of an action with regard to a balance of the total system we live in. Any conclusion or consensus is unlikely going to change the universal biological appeal of meat however.

    Ribs are good with a nice rib rub. Slow cooked in a mesquite smoker, for fall off the bone goodness.

    Ribs are bad in mass, as they cause rivers of toxic effluent which never seems to be in your backyard or in your river. Those ribs haven't cause your son or daughter to be born with asthma. That has nothing to do with you. Or does it?
  • Entropy and Civilization
    Life is said to increase the rate of entropy to maintain its complex order but relative to the way a single star disperses energy all human caused destructive events are negligible by such a comparison. If life actually increases the rate of entropy globally then why wouldn't a collision that destroys all life reduce the rate of entropy globally. I think we have to talk about the enthalpy and entropy of systems relative to one another.

    I don't understand entropy but I'd like to. The higher the rate at which a system disperses energy the higher entropy it has I think. Apokrisis is the one to ask on this.

    Unless mankind could initiate vacuum decay, nothing we could do would change the natural trend of the universe (beyond the boundaries of earth) in a meaningful way. Unless flying little data-collecting drones out into the great beyond is worthwhile.
  • Punishment Paradox
    No, We do not punish the innocent, there is no paradox. — DingoJones

    Likewise Nature, just like Justice, is blind.

    No one is innocent and no one is guilty but shit happens. Elephants and Orcas are born into the circus. Bulls go to slaughter. Both (the innocent and the guilty) can suffer the absurd outcomes of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to existential requirements of arbitrating apes.
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