I knew you'd say that — Janus

Don't go patting yourself on the back for that. Everybody seems to know what I'm going to say. :grin: I should just keep my mouth shut!

But then the unpredictable is expected, so to be truly unpredictable the madman should sometimes be predictable, because that would be unexpected — Janus

Yes, you're on the right track.

How about: because Aristotle's Metaphysics is as sane, sober, dry, and methodical piece of philosophical reasoning as exists anywhere in the corpus. What you're describing seems much more characteristic of Nietszche than anything in Aristotle. — Wayfarer

I dunno. Aristotle's love of art is, for me, the smoking gun in re the possibility that he was himself a mad artist. Plato had warned us against the artistic types and ironically, it was his beloved pupil, Aristotle, who was the first to philosophize on the "merits" of art. Et tu Brute!

theia mania.
— TheMadFool

Is that what we should expect from an enlightened mad fool instead of mundane madness? — Janus

Madmen are, as far as I know, unpredictable. Expect the unexpected is the rule.

Thanks. Do you associate enlightenment with the acquisition of virtue (sorry about that phrase) or is virtue an entirely separate domain? — Tom Storm

Sorry for butting in but theia mania.

@Gnomon

:monkey: :point: Me

I'd have to agree with this, although something doesn't exactly sit right with me... I'll give it some thought and try to pinpoint my dissatisfaction. — john27

I'll be waitin'.

How do we know Aristotle wasn't suffering from episodic psychosis and that metaphysics was what happened in one of his fits of madness. Are we attempting to understand a "work" of insanity? This is a serious question for there have been documented cases in other fields: the tortured artist. In fact the idea of a tortured artist traces its origins back to Aristotle's teacher Plato and we all know Plato had a low opinion of art and artists while Aristotle's views were more favorable. That's a big clue in solving the mystery of metaphysics. It seems possible that Aristotle was himself a tortured artist flip-flopping back and forth between sanity and insanity and metaphysics had its genesis in the mind of a troubled genius. :chin:

In the same vein, I wonder if philosophy has a higher proportion of contributors who were borderline or full-blown psychos.

Yes. A picture is worth a thousand philosophical metaphors. — Gnomon

:up:

amor fati — Ross

Go with the flow is what that means to me. Very Daoist!

:ok:

Consistency is about truth. If you don't care about the truth, and you don't need to, consistency be damned! That's in classical logic though. If you're interested in not just the truth but about how our minds work, you should abandon a zero tolerance attitude towards inconsistency. My best guess is we're prone to holding inconsistent beliefs/ideas for the simple reason that it expands our options and that's always a good thing, no? Oops! Never say always.

Let's do a little thought experiment shall we? If our minds rejected inconsistencies i.e. if it were incapable of cognitive dissonance, how would that impact/affect our lives? If I may be allowed an evolutionary perspective, it makes a lot of sense to confuse your competitor, to be precise it's to your advantage if you can make prey think you're harmless and predators think you're dangerous i.e. sending mixed signals is key to survival. This, I suspect, is the reason why our brains have evolved to tolerate/accept inconsistencies. It keeps us on our toes - once you can't decide whether that brown thing floating towards you is a croc or log, thinking its both is just a baby step away. :grin:

I'm consistently inconsistent! :grin:

Why am I? — Monkee

Why are you what?

:gasp:

Why am Monkee?

We're all monkeys, great apes to be precise. You're not alone if that makes you feel any better.

Wanting to be consistent is a bit like playing Jenga. The tower eventually collapses, the objective is to, well, prolong the agony (torture?) :grin:

The game ends when any portion of the tower collapses, caused by either the removal of a block or its new placement. The last player to complete a turn before the collapse is the winner. — Wikipedia

Enlightenment is a tangent on a circle! One might wanna look at it as a slingshot maneuver!

Anytime anyone digresses (goes off on a tangent), that person is, one could say, enlightened!

Decycling! I wonder why Aristotle thought the heavens were full of circles? They are not, they're ellipses. I suppose it's easier to attain escape velocity in an elliptical orbit - ellipses are straighter in certain sectors. :grin:

While we may live differently - some in luxury, others in abject poverty; some beautiful, others ugly; some white, others black, some in-between, and so on - we can all be killed or we can all die in the exact same way - strangulation, drowning, lightning strikes, burning, bullets, old age, disease, all these have 100% fatality rates irrespective of race, religion, or anything else one might perceive to a be a difference - and that's why, although not in a way that would satisfy all onlookers, The Grim Reaper is considered The Great Equaliizer. Money has in certain ways upset the perfection of this circle of life with death at its center, equidistant from all the living.

Meditate on Thanatos.

$\Delta \space Law$ = Everything changes.

If the $\Delta \space Law$ is true, it itself should change.

If the $\Delta \space Law$ changes, $C \space Law$ = Some things don't change.

$\Delta \space Law$ leads to a contradiction!

A perpetual motion machine is also possible if the energy required to do the same thing drops (inertia?)

Suppose machine P recharges itself with 70% efficiency.

1. P does work worth 30% of its total energy (x)

2. It reinvigorates itself with 70%. (0.7x)

3. The same work now requires 15% energy (halving)

4. 15% of 0.7x = 0.105x.
.
.
.

Both the energy available and the energy used are geometric progressions:

Energy available, EA: $1 \times 0.7 \times 0.7 \times...$

Energy used, EU: $0.3 \times 0.5 \times 0.5 \times 0.5 \times...$

The nth term in EA = $0.7^{n-1}$ = $0.5^{0.5n-0.5}$

The nth term in EU = $0.3 \times 0.5^{n-1}$ = $0.5^{0.7+n}$

$0.5n - 0.5 \lt 0.7 + n$

EA > EU at all points in the series. EA $\rightarrow 0$ but never actually hits $0$ but EU tends to $0$.

It's like the amount of food we have is decreasing but so is our appetite. There's always food to go around. :grin:

sad — baker

sad — baker

That - sadness - is the key to nirvana. Feel sad, and I mean true heartache and we set the stage for enlightenment. Maybe nirvana is just sorrow in a disguise.

Damn! Now everyone has to suffer! — James Riley

Hehe. This wouldn't have happened if...

Mass delusion is when all your followers kill themselves, expecting the world to end as you told them. Objectivity is when you find out who your cell-mate is. — Cuthbert

:lol: So it would seem...so it would seem...

:grin:

If one kg fission material could produce 2kg of it and this is used again for energy, your input is exponential, as well as your output — Cartuna

Yes. Is it possible? $1 \rightarrow 2 \rightarrow 4 \rightarrow 8...$ We have the math ready, as it were, to find a physical phenomenon to latch on to.

A mathematical universe?

It's just a linear growth model. — Cartuna

:grin:

If 1 kg of matter can produce 2 "kg" of energy and 1 "kg" of energy can produce 1 kg of matter.

1. 1 $\rightarrow$ 2.

2. 1 for recharge, the other 1 for use

3. We get 1 kg of matter again.

4. Go to 1.

Voila, we have a perpetual motion machine.

Is this exponential?

1 gives 2, 2 gives 4, 4 gives 8,...

That would be very handy indeed. — Cartuna

Indeed but the chances are that we're daydreaming. I'm just intrigued by the mathematical model for population growth - allegedly exponential.

objective — Gnomon

I can't tell the difference between mass delusions/hallucinations and objectivity.

The problem with perpetual motion machines (I suppose the holy grail of mechanical engineers):

Say machine P,

1. P must produce energy, say 100%.

2. 100% must recharge P + Do work.

3. Doing work will consume, say 30%.

4. Available energy to recharge is 70%.

5. Even if all 70% can be used to recharge P, you get only 70%.

6. Our new total energy is 70%.

7. Repeat the process and P loses energy at each step.

8. $70 \% \times 70 \% \times ... \rightarrow 0$

But $0$ is not something you take lightly.

Fission/Fusion? If only a fraction of the energy released in a fission/fusion reaction is needed to create another fissile/fusionable material/particle then we're talking.

Fissioning particel A releases 10 J of energy. 1 J of energy is required to synthesize fissile particle B which again releases 10 J of energy, and so on. I dunno! It's interesting to think about.

What my intuition tells me is that we have to look for is a geometric progression vis-à-vis energy production instead of the usual, arithmetic progression. I'm no good at math, sorry if this is a stupid idea.

$E = mc^2$

Change

1. Replacement change: From the little that I know of computer graphics, if you see a red triangle on screen and then it changes color to blue, what's actually happening is the red triangle is being erased (clear screen) and then a blue triangle is being drawn in the empty screen. In short, a new blue triangle is being swapped for the old red triangle.

2. Non-replacement change: You take a red triangle, made of metal bars, and you color it blue. The metal triangle remains same and its hue changes.

Can we actually tell the difference between replacement change and non-replacement change? Does it matter?

The Prevention is Better than Cure Paradox

The Covid-19 pandemic is in full swing. The most effective strategy is not to cure it (given the givens) but to prevent it. Close the stable door after the horse has bolted. :chin:

I like the images you post. I wish we could do this for all of philosophy. Pictures have a certain quality to them that allows them to get a point across in ways that words somehow can't.

A picture is worth a 1000 words.

Some, I'm told, think in pictures/images. An Artistic turn, à la the so-called linguistic turn, in philosophy is a long overdue project. :grin:

The internet was designed by its creators for sharing information (communication) in the fastest way possible with current technology. Does easier communication harm democracy or does it facilitate the democratic process? There's no clear-cut answer to this question or, if one demands an answer, it's both. The truth, facts, things vital to a healthy democracy are easily transmissible and accessible but the downside, even lies & disinformation, anti-democratic forces as it were, utilize the same channels with the exact same advantages.

What's the net effect though? Positive/negative? The same nose through which we take in life-sustaining air, oxygen to be precise, is Covid-19's preferred mode of entry/exit into/from the human body.

I think that you are right to emphasise the power of music and how it can make someone do -'anything'. It has a hypnotic quality. I do wonder about the subliminal levels of music. Of course, this could go too far with the attempt to remove all 'negativity'. However, even though I like the music of Nirvana, my intuition is that it would probably not be a good idea to listen to that music all day. Even though I love the Doors, I do try to balance out what I listen to because music probably affects us so deeply, and getting the right balance may be essential. Sometimes, I just spend so much time thinking what music to listen to. — Jack Cummins

Wait till the government gets wind of the power of music.

I haven't the slightest idea what happened between Islam and music.

Strictly speaking, the words ‘Islamic religious music’ present a contradiction in terms. The practice of orthodox Sunni and Shi‘a Islam does not involve any activity recognized within Muslim cultures as ‘music’. The melodious recitation of the Holy Qur'an and the call to prayer are central to Islam, but generic terms for music have never been applied to them. Instead, specialist designations have been used. However, a wide variety of religious and spiritual genres that use musical instruments exists, usually performed at various public and private assemblies outside the orthodox sphere. — Eckhard Neubauer, Veronica Doubleday, Islamic religious music, New Grove Dictionary of Music online

Islamic geometric patterns.

A certain door was closed shut and quite literally sealed. Another was meant to be opened...

Sound tiling/tessellations: Shaped sounds covering space in intricate geometric patterns.

Sine waves can tile a surface. :grin:

:chin:

The idea of the 'fictional self' may be so essential to human identity because the it is bound up with the autobiographical development of the 'I', which probably filters out a lot of information and chooses which memories to hold on to. The 'I' is likely to come with essential biases, which may be connected with its own preservation and importance. — Jack Cummins

1. Ship of Theseus

2. Wittgenstein's rope analogy.

Identity is a sequence of overlapping stages and that's why we feel that there's some kind of connection/continuity between, say, the me of today and the me of tomorrow (correct my English please). It depends then, doesn't it?, on what we're looking at, the similarities or the differences. If we consider both, what emerges is a fuzzy sense of self - now you see it, now you don't.

It's a 'strange loop', or self-referential tangled hierarchical system (vide Douglas Hofstadter ... or Thomas Metzinger); the extent of self-reflection, I suspect, corresponds to the limits of the semiotic or symbolic systems available to cognition. — 180 Proof

:up: On target.

Convenient fiction?
— TheMadFool
Yes. Without that fictional Self, we would not know where we fit into the story of Life. We are the stars of our own show, playing in the Cartesian Theater. :smile: — Gnomon

It's my suspicion that the apparent lack of a definitive referent for the "I" is more about hope mixed with fantasy than anything truly substantive in the sense there's a real problem. If there is an issue it's death and our denial of that fact.

As a generalization, there have been periods of real growth. For instance, the post WWII boom brought real growth (increases in real income) for about 30 years. During the last 45 years, real wages have decreased by a minimum of 25% for most working class people. The cause has been stagnant wages and inflation.

Now, if you want a period of time when economic growth was a real drag, take the period between the collapse of the Roman Empire (say, 600 a.d. to around 1400 a.d. for a round figures) the annual growth rate was 1/100th of a percent. People could look forward to a 1% increase in income per century. As it happens, those 800 years were not terrible for everyone. Life was just very stable. — Bitter Crank

So, net zero growth is not gonna be as problematic as some of us would think. After all if a growth rate of 1/100th of a percent can be maintained over roughly a millennia, it doesn't seem to be all that bad for us.

"I think" is the assumption; "I think" presupposes the thinker. — Banno

To think, there's got to be a thinker. That's why Descartes' argument works. This is, as you said, an entailment.

I would treat the thinker as a necessary condition to be able to say "I think". Are all necessary conditions presuppositions.

My hunch is: all presuppositions are necessary conditions but not all necessary conditions are presuppositions.

Put anther way, in trying to show the validity of "I think therefore I exist" it instead shows that it is circular, that "I think" already supposes that "I exist".

Descartes' argument is valid, but circular. — Banno

An entailment. — Banno

Didn't you say that it was a presupposition?

Perhaps it's both but then that doesn't help, does it?