I can think of three major elements to rational thinking: its form is linguistic, its structure is logical, and its orientation is (ostensibly) self-interest (either direct or indirect). Under that definition, animals do not have rational thinking because they lack language. And intuitive thinking, which allows for action without explicit knowledge of the reasons for action is similarly excluded.

Animals do have communications systems though, and therefore skills, and human intuitive thinking can be a better (esp. faster) way of solving problems, avoiding danger, dealing with people etc. In fact, think about most real life conversations--they are almost entirely intuitive. Who's thinking explicitly about what to say next?

Person A: Hi, how are you?
Person B: (*I'm not so good but do I want this person to know that? I mean, do I really trust them? Probably not, so I should just lie and say I'm fine. But wait, lying is unethical, isn't it? I remember that Kantian thing. Yes, honesty is the best policy. No, wait, I'm being irrational. It's a white lie. No one gets hurt and I'm acting against my self-interest by being open with everyone, right? But Kant... Stop being nuts, even Kant would have said he's fine. The dude had huge books to write. He'd hardly stand here all day debating how to respond to what is any case just a non-literal customary linguistic tic with no real concern behind it... etc etc)

In fact, when you get right down to brass taxes, who's doing much rational thinking at all that leads to anything concrete? We do plenty of post hoc rationalizing to make us feel good about our irrational behaviour though.

I daren't look at my probably-by-now decimated post history. Oh, Michael Bay, where art thou?

We shouldn't have added much at all (without uploads) since the last clear out. It's just text, right? So, I don't get why it's filling up so quickly. And if it keeps doing that, it won't be long until there's nothing left to clear out.

You don't need to join any other servers other than the TPF one. And it's just a backup right now. There's nothing to fear except perhaps Banno.

Benefits: It won't go down regularly. It won't disappear. There's a built-in voice chat option (I don't know if this needs to be turned on by Jamal though). I am there. What else? Easy dark mode.

You're very welcome! I have to admit it's not really a TZ episode. I was pranking Shawn on that bit (as with the two follow-ups in the Shoutbox). I made the story up myself, inspired by your thread. So, thank you for the inspiration!

The idea of finding a library sounds good to me. I wonder if I would write though, without the expectation anyone would ever read it. That turns into a kind of philosophical question on the value of art, I think.

Anyhow, great to hear you are -ve COVID and feeling good. :party: :smile:

Anyhow, my advice is stop rotting your brain with Twitter pol. You will become just another victim of psychological entropy.

All of this personal marketing stuff is calculated and generally works. It's unlikely Harris has anything to do with it.

Mods are still involved in decisions about guidelines. But only admins can create new categories or edit acoounts etc.

Of course, @Jamal is the owner, so he has to be an admin, despite the fact he spends most of his days filling out colouring books and watching Peppa Pig.

Note that if you look at my content, most of it is non-philosophical. A lot of it is my own idea of art (or just messing around) in the Shoutbox. That's one reason I decided to step out of admin shoes. It's a philosophy, not an art, forum, and I don't feel I do enough philosophy on here now to justify being an admin. I remain a mod because I think I can still offer enough to the site to justify that. But we all need to recognize where we are and act accordingly.

I addressed this Feedback thread to Baden and also enquired about the 'Literary Event'. I'm not sure how to interpret his lack of response - or anything from other mods. Perhaps there was a team meeting behind the scenes... — Amity

Sorry, I missed the second bit. For the first bit, I think @Jamal explained the general approach well. We both value art and creativity highly (e.g. much of the time my main interest is art and trying to create it, though I do oscillate between that and work and more philosophical stuff), but the forum is set up to prioritize philosophical content on the first page, so that means less-philosophical content may be put in the lounge.

To me, that's not a value judgement: "Less-philosophical" does not equal "worse" in a general sense, but logically it equates to a lower priority overall on a philosophy forum. Otherwise, we would need to redescribe / rename ourselves.

For the literary event part, I think once a year makes it more special. However, I encourage creative activity year round. The "Get Creative" thread is part of that and anyone can write a short story any time and post it in the category set up for that.

In conclusion: Democrats and Republicans have become very Machiavellian lately. — Eros1982

It's always been so. They are in a vicious competition for power in a two-party system. It's just there used to be agreed-on conventions that are now being disregarded, so the viciousness is closer to the surface. A truly moral politician can only be at a disadvantage re power, as morality imposes limitations on action.

Modern version would definitely grapple ChatGPT / Big Brother rather than tape recorders / hidden "friends".

Edit: I've never seen "Cast Away", so I don't know.

Edit: Just read the plot of that movie. The "Wilson" plot device may have been inspired by the above TZ episode.

Isolating because of COVID sounds like a realtively short stint. You'll be fine. And here is as good a place as any to find (virtual) human company.

I'd binge watch The Twilight Zone on my TV. — Shawn

Did you see the episode where there was a guy that got isolated on an abandoned island, which was suddenly evacuated because of--as it turned out--unfounded fears of a tsunami? And somehow he was the only one who got left behind--can't remember why--but there is loads of food around and no issue of physical survival etc. He's just on his own and expects to be for a long time, the other inhabitants having permanently relocated.

Anyhow, being desperate for company, he gets lonely and builds a "friend" from papier mache and bits of wood and stuff (it's a little bit of a plot hole that he couldn't just find a shop mannequinn or something, but anyway). It ends up looking like a kind of scarecrow, but with lighted eyes as he's connected up two Christmas tree bulbs in the head. So, he builds this basic Frankensteinish friend to take the edge of his loneliness and starts talking to it, but it's not enough. He still finds the loneliness too hard to bear.

As a next step, he starts to tape record himself having conversations in two voices, his own and this other attempt at a voice of his new "friend" (turns out fairly creepy of course) and then he deletes the half that's his voice and puts the tape recorder in the Frankenstein head and waits a while and then puts it on play. So, now he's sort of talking to the thing during the silences that he created by deleting his part of the "conversation". Firstly, it's mostly small talk: he has the friend asking him questions about his day and so on, and it kind of works for a while, but then he gets bored with that because he remembers what the friend is going to say and what he said on the original recording, so there's no novelty or suspense to the conversation.

He tries to get round this by making multiple tapes, so many that he can't remember exactly what's on each one and then he puts a random one into the head. But he still sort of remembers, and he has to, actually, because if he completely loses the thread of the conversation, his "friend's" side will stop making sense. So, he's kind of stuck in this tradeoff between novelty / authenticity and the necessity for artificiality, as he is always essentially talking to himself. This gets really frustrating and in a fit of pique one night he destroys the "friend", ripping the head off and smashing the tape recorder inside.

Here's the thing, when he wakes up the friend is back together. There's a POV scene of him opening his eyes and at the end of the bed, the friend with his flashing christmas-tree-light eyes looking straight at the protagonist. Pretty creepy. Then, you probably guessed it, the friend starts talking independently. "Why did you do that to me?" "I'm your only friend" this kind of thing and he also answers the main protagonist when the latter talks back to him: "Are you real?" >> "Yes!"

So, the guy is freaked out now... But, at last he has someone else, independent of him, to talk to, a "real" friend (even though he considers he may have gone crazy, he figures "who cares"? he's achieved his goal). So, the story seems to be about to end moe or less happily.

The twist is, and, again, you may have guessed, he hasn't actually gone crazy. It's just there was one other person who got left behind, who had been watching the guy all along and had put the dummy back together with a microphone that he speaks through. He too needed a friend. Turns out (revealed through flashback) this guy had been the source of the false tsunami warning that caused the island to be evacuated (because he was a misanthropist who wanted to be completely alone). However, when he achieved his goal (except for the accident of the other one person, the main protagonist, also being left behind), he found he also needed human company, but couldn't face the protagonist due to his guilt at what he'd done and the shame of realizing he really did need other human beings, despite his misanthropy. The Frankenstein "friend" somehow solves both their problems.

The last bit of the script is the main protagonist saying to his friend "You've got to pomise me one thing. There's only two of us, you and me, and you're my only friend. Never leave me. Do you promise?"

Then we get a close-up of the face of the guy speaking through the microphone. He pauses. He doesn't know how to answer.

The End.

https://pasteboard.co/PYcv579vrqwX.png

That difficulty is the trade-off. 58 pages of continued effort to discuss the issue suggest, that while the context is not ideal, the results have not been fruitless.

Funny you defend this ghettoizing of the topic of antinatalism (something you vociferously disagree with), — schopenhauer1

I don't vociferously disagree with it actually. Depending on how "it" is presented. E.g. If someone said to me, "I don't want to have children because the world is a dangerous and corrupted place and I don't want them to suffer", I'd say "makes sense". But as we discussed before, you were creating literally dozens of threads on the same theme, and it is a niche topic, hence this is the solution.

Because there were too many.

Er, let's stay on topic. You are both entitled to your opinions on this, but it doesn't really matter.

Please don't bring religion into threads that are not directly about religion. No one needs to be lectured about your religious beliefs. Future comments along these lines will be deleted, both in the lounge and elsewhere.

The rest of you, calm down, please.

Benny Hill. I remember him. He did a lot of very fast running around. It was funny. Most people can't run that way. Watching football, nah. I would probably play it though if I had any friends or physical flexibility.

Each to his own. I can enjoy movies but they kind of overstimulate me and leave me feeling flat afterwards. And I also feel that I've watched enough to get the major narratives. I generally don't feel I'm being edified if you know what I mean. However, I could also be missing out just due to my brain not being able to digest them properly or something. Who knows...

Considering the extreme statistical unlikelihood that asking someone out or having sex will land a well-meaning commonsensical person in trouble, this is a bit like telling people to emigrate to a country with no roads so they won't get knocked down. Better advice would be "look left and right before you step on the tarmac". I mean, consider the likely hundreds of millions of people having sex just today in Western countries, how many of them do you think are going to end up in prison?

I had thought you were using hyperbole as a rhetorical device to criticize PC in Western countries or some such, which could be a starting point for a sensible critique, but taking this literally it just fails at the first hurdle for anyone with even minimum social skills and understanding of the opposite sex.

Much I agree with but

what you describe as "a special connection between artist and world", is better described as the artist's understanding of the connection between the audience and the world. What a good artist knows, is how to present (give) the world to the audience. That is why true art is best known as an act of unconditional love. — Metaphysician Undercover

Here there's the possibility of a descent into a kind of degenerative recursiveness, the artist viewing their relationship with their subject matter through the eyes of their audience viewing the artist's relationship with their subject matter etc, a kind of hall of mirrors effect that distances the artist from the source of their art. I have had this problem with certain media, e.g. photography. In a way I know too much (in the abstract) about how a particular form of photographic art is successfully presented to an audience and that tends to cripple my photographic attempts at art. I don't tend to have such problems with writing.

In my mind, the solution is that for this type of "knowing" to work it should be purely intuitive and incidental rather than purposeful and deliberative. Not only then is the stain of self-consciousness avoided but that of manipulation. I can take a type of photo that works in the abstract and hate it because it feels overpurposed and inauthentic. I can also take a type of photo that is more original and hate it because it doesn't work in the abstract. But I think I prefer the latter sin, which reveals a deficiency rather than masks it.

Got it. Well, polymarket has flipped Dem again, so I guess the RFK bump has been fleeting.

Yes, there was just the right combination of mystery, joy, wonder, and menace in Wilder. Depp didn't have a hope. It's like trying to repaint the Mona Lisa. He didn't even look right. He ended up somewhere between Edward Scissor's Hands and the Addams family.

If you need your spouse to provide for you, it is your job to make sure that he voluntarily wants to keep doing that. — Tarskian

(My bolding). Back to sexism again.

Muslim men are willing to risk their lives and die for what they believe in. Western men are not. — Tarskian

(My bolding) But according to your own story, you advocate running away rather than risking anything. That's the whole point of this thread as you've described things.

It's starting to unravel into incoherency and self-contradiction anyhow.

I don't agree that a pure medium can provide coherency where none comes from the artist's connection with their subject matter. Incoherency in that respect to me must always be only apparent incoherency if it's to remain art. Otherwise,there's no way to distinguish random sounds from art. And there's no boundary between just noise and music. Art to me is what results from a special connection between artist and world that the listener, reader, viewer etc can access through a given medium. But the connection is the origin of the art not the medium.

Monkey-see, Orangeutan-do: batshit RFK, Jr replaces fake-redneck JD Vance as VP canditate in MAGA-GOP bait-n-switch (instigated by Kelly Ann Conway) in the days or weeks to come. — 180 Proof

Really?

What you advocate, on the other hand, creates a perverse incentive structure that will rather sooner than later destroy western society. It is exactly the most vulnerable people who will suffer the most from such societal collapse. — Tarskian

Generalising from @Benkei's earlier point: If social collapse happens, it will be due to laws not adequately protecting the economically weak but allowing for their exploitation by the rich. At a macro scale, this can relate to tax policy, or at a more micro scale, family law, where partners who sacrifice more in a relationship are never compensated or if parents are not legally obliged to financially support their children.

So, the situation is the opposite to how you present it. You appear to be financially self-sufficient but seem to feel that, to maintain social stability, people like you are the ones who should be protected more than the vulnerable, such as children who aren't being supported by their fathers, or mothers who can't afford child care so they can go out and work. You are not presenting any kind of a moral theory but a purely self-interested strategy.

The same decision that may be a non-issue in one jurisdiction will result in a lengthy prison sentence in another jurisdiction. That is why jurisdiction shopping is such an important tool. — Tarskian

What exactly are you afraid you will be imprisoned for? I've lived in Western countries and not only never heard of anyone going to prison for a dating misunderstanding, I've never heard anyone even talk about anyone they know having that issue. Maybe you should look at the statistics. Or just consider using common sense. Your "fears" seem overblown.

That is the number one reason why Islam is now gradually but surely taking over Europe. — Tarskian

Is all of this just a roundabout way of saying Islamic countries are better than Western countries?

... Like you can read the play versions of the stuff I posted, but the Dahl book cannot substitute for e.g. the brilliance of Gene Wilder. And 99.9% of visual entertainment is trash.

Does "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" count? — T Clark

Original 70s version only. Probably the only thing worth watching mentioned on this entire thread.

I hate the facebooky type meme posts and twitter links too, even in the lounge. Hard to escape all that tho'.

Hating the country where you live is dumb. — javi2541997

Can we leave the guy alone now? It seems like he was just trying to be honest.

Thailand is awfully motonormative from two perspectives. One is that cars don't stop for pedestrians even at pedestrian crossings and the other is that cities are built for cars. E.g. In order to get to work just across the road in Bangkok, I have to first walk half a mile to get to a bridge to cross the road (there is no other way). Other cities are similarly defaced to the point where you'll be strolling around and then find yourself out of pavement and nothing to do but a major track back or risk life and limb by walking on a road with car traffic at your back and motorbikes riding at you contraflow. Forget about little green men helping, they might as well be aliens pointing you to your death. In Thailand, cars freely turn left through red lights and pedestrian go signals. My point is you can take all your "horror" stories from London or Auckland or Moscow or wherever and chuck them under an oncoming truck. They do not compare to the motorised dystopia over here. That, yes, just seems to be taken for granted by the locals.

Just finished a biography of David Foster Wallace "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story" by D.T. Max. Sad and compelling.

Being Irish, I'm definitely not happy with him representing one of our major news outlets as a purveyor of racist trash, but I'll listen to any attempt at an explanation in any case.

I didn't realize that the jpeg was from a different article or website. — Leontiskos

I'm guessing you weren't supposed to seeing as Lionino is still insisting he only posted something from a "mainstream journal".

The article linked is unobjectionable because it is from the Irish Independent. The headline jpeg is from a right wing news site funded by neofascists and the headline "The Great Replacement" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement is a racist conspiracy theory.

Lionino masked the racist jpeg with a link to a different article.

Edit: Cross-posted