The binary logic is just part of the process of negation. If I say "love is not attachment" then that would mean "love is detachment". I evaluated both in my previous post and came to the conclusion that love is neither attachment nor detachment. Perphaps it's somewhere in the middle or, even more intriguingly, nowhere.

How is our relation to reality triadic?

Just offering my own insights into the Tao Te Ching.

You are going to make do without truth? Go on, then; you first.

I'll watch from here. Should be worth a laugh. — Banno

:grin:

We need to think outside the box. Truth is priceless for it can make the difference between life and death; however if survival is our #1 priority, and evolution say it is, truth is just a means towards that end. Lies have value too (gennaion pseudos, pious fiction, white lies) and post-truth is probably just a recognition of this simple fact.

The brain is designed for survival. Truth and survival are two entirely different things. — Brian Greene

In my universe, the Tao Te Ching is an esoteric text. Weird things happen!

Now that I think of it, despite the claims that fake news and its ilk started the whole thing, it's actually high time philosophy underwent a paradigm shift - we need to shed our old habit of worshipping and making offerings to Veritas (truth) and switch allegiance to some other god/goddess. Truth isn't the only game in town, that's the takeaway of post-truth. Question is what does it look like people gave up on truth for? Happiness is the prime suspect!

To locate the JWST at a Lagrange point was probably a bad idea. They're gravitational dead zones, the gravitational pulls of different celestial bodies cancelling each other out; perfect spots for (micro)meteors to settle down, call home and cause irreparable damage to supersensitive gold mirrors.

By feeding them everything we can create! Those machines are hungry. — Bret Bernhoft

Sounds like a plan!

I concur. We must treat computers as a distinct linguistic species - our job is to translate human ideas into machine language. If they're good at finding patterns in pictures, let's give 'em pictures, oui monsieur? The question is how do we render the abstract (ideas) concrete (images)?

The bad news: We can get addicted to thinking
The good news: If you have to get addicted to something, inshallah let it be to thinking.

Noli turbare circulos meos! — Archimedes

$\uparrow$Last words of Archimedes.

Yeah, but which "god may exist"? — 180 Proof

All Gods are possibilities we can't rule out with 100% certainty. Every hypothesis has a loop hole that can be plugged to stop fatal hemorrhaging ad hoc. Hence novacula occami which isn't about truth but about simplicity - there was no one but Smith in the room, the door was locked from the inside, no windows; surely Smith took his own life now that he's lying on the floor, stiff as a board and bright green! Simple!

It is by now obvious that there's no way we can tell the difference between simulation and real - the evidence that we need lie beyond our collective event horizon. Plus taking the simulation hypothesis, in essence skepticism, to its logical conclusion would mean we'll never ever be 100% sure even if we find strong evidence to support this hypothesis. So I suggest we stop trying and simply get on with our lives - we're wasting our time, oui mes amies?

Here's what I suggest:

AI is good at picking up patterns in images and also sounds too. We need to translate concepts/ideas/theories/whathaveyous into images/sounds, this is the hard part, and then let AI do its thing, this is the easy part.

What do you think guys and ... gals (if any)? :sad:

Time travel would be impossible if the past and the future didn't exist.

Computer, take me to 10,000 BC

Error! Destination does not exist!

Ok, computer, take me to 2345 AD

Error! Destination does not exist!

Ok, computer, where can you take me?

DOES NOT COMPUTE!

Danke!

:up:

He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know. — Laozi

Then he spoke ... the Tao Te Ching

He contradicted himself (Western verdict on an Eastern case) i.e. he first wrote Tao Te Ching and then took, what?, a quill?, and struck it all off like so Tao Te Ching. It looks like Laozi, not Heidegger, was the first to use the sous rature technique in philosophy.

In short there's literally nothing to translate! Transalators can rest easy if it's whether they did a good job or not that worries them.

It's only words, and words are all I have
To take your heart away. — Boyzone

The JWST hasn't made any startling new discoveries. :groan: I expected a paradigm shift event to occur. Looks like the JWST is nothing more than an upgraded HST. All that Sturm und Drang, for nothing! Maybe it's too early to comment ... astronomical data take time & money to process. Gotta be optimistic! Oui mes amies?

I neither know nor think I know. — Socrates

Socrates speaks for all mankind.

The Tao Te Ching has to be read in Chinese to understand it? I believe that's true and yet here we are pointing radio telescopes at stars hundreds of light years away, confident that we can decipher messages in alien tongues. As per the movie Contact, math is a universal language e.g. the Pythagorean theorem was discovered independently by all ancient civilizations and they all, without exception, say the exact same thing: a² + b² = c² (c is the hypotenuse, a and b are the other two sides of a right triangle).

Most people spend their profits

1. To fuel growth (use money to make more money)

2. For conspicuous consumption (splurge on expensive services/stuff)

3. To pay off debts (bank loans)

4. To make a name for themselves (foundations/trusts/grants)

5. To gain/consolidate/expand/increase influence (donations to political parties)

6. To patronize (artists/craftsmen/scientists/mathematicians)

Disbelief in God, which some atheists claim is their stance, is simply reverting back to the starting line of all epistemic enterprises which is, in this case, one step before the point where one goes "God may exist".

A walk down memory lane, Galileo's telescope.

Orient [Laozi (Daoism)] = Occident [Heraclitus (duality) + Zeno (stoicism)]

For a man of the 20^th century, I'd say Western philosophy is best-suited as the world is dominated by Western meme-plexes and a simple rule of thumb is, excluding imposition by force, ideas that survive/thrive are usually good ones.

However, given the popularity of Daoism in the West, I'd have to say there's a two-way exchange of philosophies.

Care ethics, from a drive-by of its Wikipedia entry, has as its point of origin the realization that there's more to ethics than logic (deontological ethics) and mathematics (utilitarianism) as proven by the murderer at the door and the trolley problem gedankenexperiments. It's a kind of virtue ethics says Wikipedia

This fits like a glove with my belief that both deontological & consequentialist ethics were known to but rejected by Aristotle (father of virtue ethics) & other ancient Greek philosophers. It's also possible that the Kantian & Benthamian ethics are subsumed, are a part of, virtue ethics and Aristotle simply didn't mention them separately because it was just too obvious, leaving us to connect the dots as it were.

I wouldn't want to say ethics is not about consistency (Kant) and numbers (Bentham-Mill) and I'm fairly certain Gilligan will agree; what care ethics, a type of virtue ethics, does is point out that ethics is beyond such considerations i.e. they matter, true, but even together they fail to capture the essence of ethics. Care ethics is an attempt to expose and fill in the gap in our understanding of ethics.

:up:

Indeed Jack, indeed! The modern world is no longer about truth and how to get to it but about how to lie "well". Nevertheless, in that a lie hasta have mimic truth if it is to get past our bullshitometer; post-truth, paradoxically, is still nothing more than a homage to the goddess Veritas. Even when you insult Veritas, you can only do so via praise.

Attachment, at least in the sense I’m referring to here, is not the same as the original Christian notion of love - but I could argue that most modern expressions of ‘love’ fail to distinguish between the two.

Drastically oversimplified, attachment is when you pluck the flower… — Possibility

Nice! As per your assessment then love isn't attachment and, flipping the sign, it hasta be detachment, but then we end up with the problem of having to disentangle love from indifference/insouiciance because love also isn't that either. Ergo, my brain informs me we're in a pickle. In re attachment and its opposite detachment, love is adiaphora (logically undifferentiated). It, love, is something else entirely. It is neither attachment nor detachment, it is ...

To have machines take over, kick off the technological/cognitive singularity would be the sparkling jewel in our crown even if it means our exit from the evolutionary race. What more could any intelligent species ask for? You pass on the torch and then stop to catch your breath (RIP). I heard bamboo flower only once in their lifetime, dying when it happens. :flower: :death:

The solution to technological problems, these being the royal pain in our arses, it looks like, is more technology; these in turn will have their own problems for which the solution is, again, more technology; so on and so forth until Judgment Day which, of course, will be caused by technology. We're progressing, most assuredly, from being just fucked to being royally fucked! :snicker: We're in for a treat!

I like Gnomon's idea in a very general sorta way, s/he probably needs to work on the specifics.

The Luddite movement can be pinned down to sheer jealousy - machines are (getting) better than us at being us! Machines are stronger, faster, smarter, and the only thing keeping them from leaving us in the dust is human stupidity - we're not intelligent enough to create (more) intelligent machines! Perhaps this is one of the rare occasions our idiocy saves us from a possible grim Frankensteinian fate where the invention destroys the inventor.

An option is symbiosis - a mutually beneficial partnership between man and machine - where the two potential rivals can team up; the combo a being more powerful than either alone - cyborg territory? A complementary yin-yang kinda deal! Luddites would have no reason to complain and the machines would probably approve.

:up:

Educators need to be given points for creativity when they use relatable analogies; nonetheless, a poor analogy can do more harm than good.

Mathematics is a world unto itself and its concepts probably don't map onto mundane, earthly experiences as much as we'd have preferred; this rendering mathematics quite an esoteric subject, giving it a mystical quality of sorts. All we can do is then find a best match between a mathematical idea and something everyone's experienced and hope for the best, oui monsieur?

All Cretans are liars. — Epimenedes

Epimenedes was himself Cretan.

If everybody's lyin', there are, intriguingly, no truths i.e. we're livin' in a world of lies. Given this simple truth, a paradox that deserves further study, we must recalibrate ourselves to value things other than verum (truth). This is, in my humble opinion, what post-truth is all about. What those "things other than verum (truth)" are is anybody's guess. From having no choice (but to believe truths), we now have a choice (to believe any number of falsehoods that we wish).

To me Enformationism, what I could grasp of it, manages to capture all 3 aspects of God: [omni]benevolence (stoic virtue, living in accord with the laws of nature), [omni]science (science), and [omni]potence (EnFormy, the creative force).

I know your philosophy isn't theistic in the sense that Christianity is, but I couldn't help but notice the connection between it and the Christian God's attributes as outlined above. A happy coincidence? Hard to say, but worth investigating in my humble opinion. Maybe it reveals an underlying imtuition that is universal, differing only in the specifics while being same in spirit if you catch my drift.

That's all I have for now. Good day mate!

I'd say that many people really don't believe in heaven and merely want to destroy someone they hate.
But having never killed anyone, I don't speak from experience. :) — Art48

:ok:

Excelente! All this while, for aeons on end, each living organism has been adapting to its environment, both living & nonliving and that's been the secret of our success. The long and short of it, our Mars ambitions, let them be fulfilled not by terraforming (adapting the planet to us), but via evolution (adapting us to the planet). It'll be slow ... real slow, but slow & steady wins the race. Of course if time is not our side, we'll havta take the other route, its obviously faster, relatively speaking.

The rest of your post, superb! I wish I had time to reply.

Physically:

1. Internal reproductive organs.
The difference between men and women is quite clear: the former have testes that produce sperm and the latter have ovaries that produce eggs.

2. External genetalia.
Ambiguous as their development is hormonally regulated and diseases, exposure to certain chemicals can cause changes that result in mismatch between internal and external sexual organs.

Mentally:

There doesn't seem to be any patterns which we can identify as distinctly male or distinctly female; however, this is only if we look at it from a type perspective in re mental attributes; mayhaps there's a pattern if we give due consideration to degree. For instance, both dogs and humans are intelligent (indistinguishable), but humans are more intelligent than dogs (distinguishable). This means that we'll have to deal with grey areas (vagueness) on the spectrum, one end of which is full female and the other end of which is full male and by "deal with" I mean accept.

I will look into it, thanks — Seeker

Don't mention it!

During the last century there were major shifts in questioning racism and sexism. — Jack Cummins

Good observation: Women could've been, practically are, a distinct race. Men just use women for making copies of themselves (babies). Did you know, female infanticide was a major problem in India & China a few decades ago? Ultrasonographers in India were forbidden by law to disclose the sex of the fetus - this spawned a market of back alley abortion "clinics" but that's another story.

What's interesting is Godzilla (1998) could reproduce without the aid of a male (parthenogenesis). Jesus' virgin birth maybe God's way of saying men are redundant/superfluous/unnecessary. Explains why women are the first category of hostages set free and men are, absit iniuria, dispensable.

Of interest to you maybe the Amazons, feared tribe of warrior women. Myth/fact I dunno!

Why aim for "harmony"? — 180 Proof

@Gnomon

Good question, mon ami! As far as I can tell, there's no escaping harmony. Let's say we have disharmony - this with harmony is again harmony; iterate this to $\infty$ if you wish and/but you'll always end up harmony. It's amazing this yin-yang concept - if you oppose it, you endorse it! :cool:

OP, you might also be interested in:

1. Kotov syndrome: In Kotov's 1971 book Think Like a Grandmaster, he described a situation when a player thinks very hard for a long time in a complicated position but does not find a clear path, then, running low on time, quickly makes a poor move, often a blunder.

2. The Cenitpede's dilemma

3. Choke (sports).

4. Analysis paralysis

Visit Wikipedia and follow the white rabbit (links).

Bonam Fortunam.