Yeah, his actions were stupid beyond belief, it made everything he wanted to avoid happen: NATO got bigger, large swaths of the world sanctioned Russia, etc.

But it's not speculation, NATO is the cause of the war, and should be recognized.

I mean, so far the US and EU are being oh-so-confident that he won't do anything with nukes. I wonder how they can be so confident given what's happened.

I think your guess is as good as any. My intuition is that national pride trumps everything else. I'm unclear on something: You mean bad economics inside the US or in Russia?

Russia seems to be surviving somehow.

What he said to Macron was that he needed assurances that Ukraine would not be militarized. He did not get this, hence the invasion.

I do not think Europe has been wise here at all. This whole situation is because of NATO expansion - despite what some here are saying - which was promised to not be moved "an inch to the East" back in 1992.

This could have been prevented had they taken these negotiations seriously. They were not. And here we are. I see no wisdom in this. Nor is there wisdom in the invasion either.

I see ample lack of it.

Out of the European leaders, I think Macron has done the best, he did have relatively frequent meetings with Putin. But the other ones are an utter shame, and this includes the US.

This whole affair is akin to a d**k measuring contest, and to what end? I hope you are right too, there has to be at least one or two people IN NATO and the Pentagon who actually understands that more escalation can only lead to total disaster...

The problem is nuclear weapons existing at all, not a suicidal madman. North Korea has one, even crazier and he hasn't used them.

But I ask you, what country with nukes, would willingly accept humiliation in the battlefield? I think none. I pray he doesn't go for the last option, but he's not been given situations in which he could save face, which is what he needs to get out of this disaster.

I see only Hawkishness on all sides here, escalation after escalation. There needs to be dialogue. But how can dialogue be had when conditions are this dire?

It's a big problem.

No. We cannot put forth foundationalism with certainty. This leaves open a very big problem in philosophy, we have a certain mechanism or capacity to acquire knowledge, yet we do not know what these mechanisms are. Furthermore, introspection will not reveal it to us, no matter how hard we try.

So we have to begin with consciousness as that with which we have the most confidence of existing and must merely do the best we can with what we are given.

New World by Natsuo Kirino.

Also ploughing extremely slowly through Locke's Essay this time around.

It's a bit like asking why questions as to why you want to do X, Y or Z, you end up saying I want to do X because I want to be happy or content, to ask why one wants to be happy is to ask a question whose answer cannot be provided - unless you substitute happiness for another, similar word.

As for the purpose of suffering? It's like the opposite of happiness, and we likely could not appreciate feeling good, if we did not know what it was like to feel bad, which includes suffering.

Ukraine accelerates bid to join NATO after Russia’s annexation

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/30/ukraine-accelerates-bid-to-join-nato-after-russias-annexation

In how it handles trying to get the territories back. If they go full force, it would be akin to Ukraine "invading" Russia. This might allow Russia to expand its quite horrible hands and create an extremely dangerous situation. In my view, these territories should be part of the negotiations, if we ever get to that point. I think there has to be some kind of minor land swap or a token victory of sorts that allows Putin to delcare this a "victory" - (as happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis).

I don't think total humiliation will be accepted by the Russian regime, meaning, they might go crazy. One needs to give the opponent an off ramp, however distasteful it is.

I didn't say they weren't. Russia doesn't consider it though, so it will take any attacks on these territories as an attack on Russia.

Not saying Ukraine shouldn't get them back, but I'd be careful in handling the situation.

Apropos no specific comment here, but, for the purposes of the war, it does not matter than the US, Europe and even the UN, don't consider these new territories as part of Russia, what matters is that Russia does.

We should expect Ukraine to fight for these territories back, now Russia will consider it a direct attack on them. Quite a problem.

I skimmed the paper, so I may have missed important details, but, there is a factual claim here which is mistaken. "Irrealism" has been explored, in significant detail, by Nelson Goodman in his Starmaking, but it is not clear to me he would accept a "virtual world" metaphor.

It's also not clear to me what is gained by saying that the world we experience is "virtual" - what does that even mean? As I see it, a virtual world is almost a world, but not quite, several aspects are missing, think of videogames or VR headsets: that is virtual.

Such views tend to leave the interpretation open, that this virtual world is mistaken or skewed. But if we had no "virtual" world, we wouldn't have any world. In order to be able to see or experience anything, it needs come from a perceiver, unless you would bet that the objects in the world are themselves conscious and can experience each other. Something of which we have no evidence.

"Virtual" thinking is OK, I guess, as a heuristic, but not much more than that. I think the more traditional, Schopenhauerian (and Hume, Locke, Descartes, Kant, etc.) view of the world being a representation is more accurate, it's the way we react to the stimulus of the world, without claiming that it is a simulation. It's simply the way things appear to us.

We may postulate - sensibly in my opinion - something "behind" objects that anchors them, but this "behindness" is no more "real" than what we already experience, it's another aspect of the world, which helps us make sense of experience, as I see it.

I mean, that would be my guess too. Then he would hopefully, be forced into a negotiation, which has not happened yet, before considering the use of nukes. Given the inner turmoil in Russia, people fleeing and protesting and so on, the timer is on for Putin, much more than at any stage during this war.

We can hope this doesn't cause him to break and go for broke, or he could be thrown out by the military. Too many variables in the equation.

Medvedev Says US and NATO Won’t Intervene If Russia Uses Nuke in Ukraine

https://news.antiwar.com/2022/09/27/medvedev-says-us-and-nato-wont-intervene-if-russia-uses-nuke-in-ukraine/

I don't think anyone can afford to have much confidence in even further escalation. It is not wise. People always say that no-one would dare use them because of the consequences, if philosophy has any application here, its that we can't be certain of anything. This applies to international affairs doubly so.

Ha! One good line in that horrible book! Ironic that Hitchens hated her.

Not that Hitchens was exemplary, far from it, towards the last part of his life. But it's a good quote, and its applicable to a decent range of world leaders, imo.

Britain has been having disaster after disaster since Brexit. Truss is just next in line...

Truss reminds me of a remark Christopher Hitchens made about David Cameron:

Q: What do you think about David Cameron?

A: He doesn't make me think.

Except that Truss has a genocidal streak to her. My, with leaders like these, who needs villains?

That's true. Though it should be. "Check on power" and all that media responsibility.

There tends to be very little dissent in the NYT, it tends to go with the government in relation to wars, so it's not the best site for this conflict. I think something like Democracy Now! is better, though I do occasionally go to these "traditional" sources, to see what the US establishment is thinking. It certainly has its uses, but I prefer other sites, like Al Jazeera and a few others.

RT used to be excellent for non-Russia related news. Now it's a parody. As is to be expected during wartime from a state sponsored media.

Yep. Bias is inevitable, accurate presentation of the facts given context, is not.

Thanks for those sources.

I tend to look at Al-Jazeera, FT and Antiwar.com, they seem to me to be reasonable- for the most part, though the Financial Times is inconsistent and obviously "pro-Western". Still, it's useful to know what the global elite are thinking.

Obviously I don't trust RT or CNN much in this topic. I still feel that I may be missing out on some very good websites on this topic, which, given recent developments merits getting as much accurate info as is possible at the moment. I'm skeptical of the NYT and the like. Nevertheless, and knowing that a complete bias free reporting is not possible, what sites are you all using?

There are worse things to be addicted to, by far. If someone can manage to live the much touted "balanced life", well, good for them. I haven't figured that one out.

However little we know about thoughts, we can't help having them. Maybe you can meditate and see your thoughts as things, or whatever else this entails. Nevertheless, thinking, for human beings, is much like breathing, if we stop doing it, we die. Cue in Descartes joke.

I think proof of all this comes from this very strange occurrence that has likely happened to all of us a few times at least. You are doing nothing in particular, maybe washing dishes or swimming, and BAM all of a sudden you gain an insight, seemingly out of nowhere. All the while you had the impression you were only doing an activity unrelated to thinking.

I rather someone addicted to thought harming no-one, than someone addicted to action without measuring consequences. Though there are all these options between these two extremes.

It could increase bravado from NATO. They can be accused of "cowering to Russia"-type rhetoric, which, don't get me wrong, is incredibly stupid, but exists and has be said a few times by more hawkish figures in the Republican party.

It's best to not see what would happen if such a scenario arose. But, there's not much we can do about it.

The thing is if he does drop one, even a so called "mini nuke", I don't see how NATO will not respond. They'd have to. But then that creates a self-feeding loop.

If they fired a nuke in the ocean somewhere close to Europe, that might be doable. But almost any scenario of nuke use will have consequences we can barely imagine.

They do, but one cannot deny that Russia is under severe pressure - otherwise Putin would have not made his announcement today. Of course Ukraine has lost plenty in the war, but at the moment they are looking better militarily than a few weeks ago.



Yeah, it's of no use except to scare or cause an accident that will perish us all. But from his perspective, what is he to do? Admitting defeat is never an option for a nuclear power, national pride is worse than religion here.

Looks like Russia is running out of options. And while in a more rational society this might be an impetus for negotiations, now there is a ramping up - on both sides.

They really should try to hold talks. Unless they topple Putin from the inside, it is not wise to cage a tiger with no way out. It's pretty reckless. imo.

One has to keep in mind that Kant was a Newtonian. The notions of space and time Kant had in mind, no longer apply. Which does not mean that his general framework is obsolete, far from it.

But using modern notions to classical ideas can bring about problems, if one isn't careful with the details. As for space and time being immaterial, that's terminological, not substantial. One needs to provide an adequate definition of the physical, and say what the immaterial has, that the physical does not.

It can be consciousness, as it depends on the brain. Unless you would say that the brain isn't physical, then we simply say, everything is immaterial. What we can say is that the brain is what we categorize and recognize as this thing behind our skulls which plays a crucial role in experience.

I am unsure how to read your reply. Rhetoric can be problematic in philosophy.

If it does, which I don't think is clear at all, then I'd argue that the metaphysics of science is bound to be argued for one's own personal metaphysical preferences: it can be defended as materialism, verifications, rationalistic idealism, transcendental idealism, eliminitavist, dualist, and so on.

How is the metaverse science? It's technology and a dubious one at that, if you have in mind Zuckerberg's version of it.

I perceive a tendency to conflate technology with science - it has some similarities, for example, much new tech would not be possible without scientific breakthroughs, but it does not follow that the technology itself is science, I don't think.

Science has no metaphysics. It is neutral in this regard. We choose, if we so wish, to add metaphysics to science. Everyone has a metaphysics after all, even if they dislike it.

a sad thought indeed. — Art48

Yes. However this thought does not arise when one is dead, IF we are correct in assuming that post-life is a similar state than pre-life. Death is "only" painful for the living who experience it of others and to people who are on there way out. But the actual "state", is not a reason to worry, I think.

It's not testable, reason can either accept or deny it (though it stretches credulity) and other theories can, in principle, produce similar results without relying on it.

Is it scientific? It's not clear. But it could be true, we just have no way to ascertain its veracity.

We don't know this. Reason may be a more or less affair, with sudden leaps in capacities due to the development of something like the language faculty (which animals lack, though they don't lack communication) and the emergence of self-consciousness.

Animals may have rudimentary reason, though less likely self-consciousness or reflection. But we cannot rule this out. Reasons can lead us to problems, sure, but they offer solutions to problems, which is rather helpful.

Likewise the laws of the world we imagine ourselves to be in now aren't necessarily the laws of reality on the whole.
We may be in a sub-reality. — Yohan

I'd say we don't know enough to determine whether the laws we study are or are not fundamental to the universe. So, not so much sub-reality, as representations. We seem to be locked away from "things in themselves."

I think the OP is a bit too long, I've done this before so, it's nothing personal. If you can make it more concise, then it should be easier to understand.

Going off on the title of the thread, sure, money is a fiction (illusion), but it's a real fiction, just like Harry Potter is a real character in the novel, or Winston Smith is an illusion in 1984.

Doesn't make it stop working as it does, until enough people change the way they perceive the value of paper, things will remain as they are.

You can't "literally" live in a simulation. — Yohan

This I agree with.

I'm not following the bit about the computer being linked with the mind. Does that mean that we are living in a videogame of some kind? You can describe life in many different ways.

Depends on the goal.

Empirical science is agnostic about metaphysics. You may occasionally hear the odd statement about being a "materialist" and even more rare, being an "idealist", but most scientists don't have a metaphysics - they probably don't even think about it, which is fine, the work they do does not require it.

I agree that the organ we take to be a brain, are what we - with good reason - take to be the source of experience. That's a representation. The thing is, I don't think it intelligible to suppose that experience "copies" anything. It represents, from rather poor stimulus, a very rich world. That's not a copy.

The topic here, as I understand, is that we are literally living in a computer simulation. There is no evidence for that at all. You could call the world we construct a "simulation". I think that terminology is rather strange. But, everyone is free to use these terms as they wish.

He mentions that our knowledge of the will is the closest approximation we have of the thing-in-itself, but it's not the thing-in-itself, itself, as it were. If you remind me, I'll post the relevant passage which is rather important, in my opinion.

That's the thing about this topic, there is no good argument for this at all. It was made up, now you see some fancy scenarios about the probabilities that we could live in a simulation because a sufficiently advanced civilization could do this, bla bla bla.

It has exactly the same weight as saying we are living in Einstein's dream, in another universe. How can you prove we are not? There's no way to do this. You can only say, justifiably, that I made it up - but it doesn't eliminate the plausibility.

Then again, we could be cells in God's body or anything else. But if you continue making up scenarios infinitely, as one can, you see that this is just a game with little value.

At least Putnam's brain in a vat, has uses about our mental capacities and the relation we have with the world. Simulation arguments don't even have any saving grace.

Interestingly - and while agreeing with you mostly about Zizek, he actually discusses this. It's an idea in psychoanalysis called fetishist disavowal: "I know very well, but...", (insert topic here). "I know very well that, human beings and most complex life on Earth will burn, but, how could it, given what I am seeing with my eyes right now..."

Just pointing this out, one of the interesting things I got out of engaging with Zizek for way too long, not all was wasted.