We need to study :zip: There are many possibilities to consider; as a novice skeptic, I believe one needs to explore the possibility space on every issue.

Returning to the contradiction of anatta & cogito ergo sum, how do you propose we resolve it? Neti neti as in everything we think is the self isn't the self?

I detect a fallacy in Randi's Challenge.

The late Randi's position

1. Psychic P's powers are inexplicable by science $\to$ P's a true psychic.

A psychic P's powers maybe explicable with a yet-to-be-discovered scientific theory. Mercury's orbit wasn't deemed a psychic phenomen when Newton's theory couldn't explain it.

The correct stance to adopt

2. P's a true pyschic $\to$ Pyschic P's powers are inexplicable by science.

Affirming the consequent/converse fallacy.

Thanks, but unlike the undisciplined mathematicians who make willy nilly axioms however they please, we don't rely on luck here — Metaphysician Undercover

Luck's role in your life is inversely proportional to the quality of your plans.

:snicker:

I see a ritual as a symbolic gesture.

Often its an outer appearance meant to convince you of an inner essence.

It has some parallels with magic tricks, as both are dealing with convincing appearances, but magic tries to convince you of literal occurrences while rituals try to convince you of inner essences.

I think when there is an essence, the outer symbolic gesture is often unnecessary.

Sometimes rituals/ceremonies can work like placebos / self fulfilling prophecies. — Yohan

Superb! Rituals, looks like, hold a personal meaning - it usually involves a meme-plex that imbues it with significance that's usually an accompaniment of the urge to be part of something bigger (than oneself). There was a time when the world was enough (Alexander the "great"), but now the world is not enough (Elon Musk and his space ambitions). Does Elon Musk perform any rituals we aren't aware of?

staying silent — Yohan

How do we make sense of this apparent contradiction? Is it a question of ethics, being pragmatic, calling it as you see it, being honest, perhaps gennaion pseudos, a complex puzzle that needs solving, all of the above, none of the above?

We'll need to work on it mon ami! Clearly anatta translates in English as no self. Do you think this is a mistransaltion of a more nuanced concept of I the Indians had OR do you suppose Buddha's I $\neq$ Descartes' I?

Looks like a neo-Luddite is simply opposed to technology, the reason for doing so is irrelevant although having a good one would make the movement that much stronger.

Technology has, by and large, been about one or all of the following.

1. Speed (doing stuff faster)
2. Accuracy (better measurement)
3. Power (machines are, pound-for-pound, stronger)
4. Error reduction (computers don't make mistakes in calculations)
5. Risk (bomb disposal robots)
6. Biologically impossible (Planetary rovers like Curiosity)

I don't see why neo-Luddites have a problem with with 5 (risk) and 6 (biologically impossible).

The heart of the matter - our beef with technology - is the last of the 4 Ds robots are used for (Dirty, Dull, Dangerous, Dear jobs). Slavery is making a comeback and in a big way!

Ok I did and yes I understand. But I apply my same test - if there was such constantly divergent word meanings of words as this implies, it seems like discourse would be total chaos. If you're meaning of God is a deity, and mine is a dishtowel....that's a conversation killer. Isn;t it? — GLEN willows

My argument speaks for itself, no? The agreement we sometimes encounter has to be a fluke e.g. when we accidentally see the same meaning in words. As far as I can see, there doesn't exist a failsafe method to ensure we all have the same meaning in mind when we discourse. The one that immediately jumped out at me - inconsistency checks (as you can see I've refined my position) - is no good. If there's a way out of this bottle, it is a Cartesian one i.e. we must find at least one word whose meaning is identical for everyone and then build up from thereon

Please reread my post. The "difference" you said we'll notice is, to my reckoning, covered by inconsistency/consistency, something I said would be one if not the only way to find out whether or not two people in conversation are talking past each other or not.

Is my red the same as your red? We can never know, oui?

Of course, if my red is A and your red is B in a consistent way i.e. when we see red, I always see A and you always see B, we will agree on all issues of redness. However A $\neq$ B still.

The same applies to words. Take the word "god". It may mean X to me and Y to you. In the domain of ideas however, we have a way of checking whether we're talking about the same thing or not. Logic! X will be consistent with ideas that maybe inconsistent with Y. Not out of the woods though because these other ideas are also problematic in the exact same way X and Y are.

Imagine a world with only 2 words W₁ and W₂ and two people P₁ and P₂. When P₁ sees W₁, he thinks meaning M₁ and when P₂ sees W₁ he thinks meaning M₂. How do they determine whether they're talking about the same thing? They'll need to check for consistency/inconsistency vis-à-vis W₂, its meaning to be precise. Unfortunately, when P₁ sees W₂, he thinks meaning M₃ and when P₂ sees W₂ he thinks meaning M₄. It's quite obvious as to what they have to do - check for consistency/inconsistency in re the meaning of W₁, but that's exactly what they don't know. W₁'s meaning can't be understood without W₂'s meaning and W₂'s meaning can't be understood without W₁'s meaning i.e. neither's meaning can be understood. Chicken-and-egg situation.

Anatta (no self/Buddhism). How would you resolve the contradiction therein between anatta (Siddhartha Gautama) & cogito ergo sum (René Descartes)?

Indeed!

All this Sturm und Drang about mind-body dualism, if that is what we're talking about, in my humble opinion, can be chalked up to a simple fact:

THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. — Multivac

We must then resort to speculation, not the wild kind but one guided by reason. In a way we're exploring the possibility space until, sometime in the future, we manage to find conclusive evidence that would settle the question once and for all.

It is drawn very directly from scripture. See Mark 12:28. I believe it is the most important teaching in the NT. Many Christian denominations consider it the core of their religion.

It actually is meaningful. People could live life any number of ways and there's no reason that one necessarily needs to prioritize love. — Moses

Fab!

Interesting!

Ok!

Idealism & solipsism together is a chicken-and-egg situation. Everything depends on the mind to exist + I alone exist. This raises the following conundrum: To exist I must think (about myself); To think (about myself) I must exist.

Not that I'm a psychologist, but methinks the brain blocks out the pain & evil in the world, locks it all up in a special place, deep in our subconscious in order to stay sane. I have used antivirus software and there's this feature called quarantine which is kinda like a prison where malware are isolated so that they can't do damage to the computer. Same applies to dangerous memes and our brains - imagine if we were ever to feel all the pain & evil extant in our world; it would overwhelm us completely. It would be a chain reaction of suffering, no one would be happy and that's the worst-case scenario, oui? That outta the way, I'd say there's no pleasure that ain't in some way guilty and we're all culpable if it were a crime to turn a blind eye to the suffering of other people. Confiteor, mea culpa.

Fear of death (instinct).
Always wearing a seat belt (habit).
Touching your lucky shirt 3 times every time before you get in your car (ritual).

Too bad, eh? Many great thinkers were of ambiguous gender/sex. I just read the Wikipedia entry on Joan D'Arc, patron saint of France; she had to cross-dress as a man to be given respect. Whether, in the end, she actually turned into a man (in mind) is not mentioned. Is it true that for a woman to be taken seriously, she has to be a man? That's wrong in so many ways than I'd care to mention. Oh well!

Homosexuality is clearly not an ‘evolutionary dead end’ because it occurs in many species and has not disappeared for millions of years.

My question was not really one I expected to be answered because the data sets are too tricky I reckon. If you know of a study that measures the Big Five for gays, lesbians and bisexuals I’d be interested to look at the data. — I like sushi

:up: No patterns is the only explanation why we're so perplexed. Back in the old days it was exactly the opposite, LGBTIQ were outliers - they didn't make sense to heterosexuals who were the majority.

Quite possibly if the LGBTIQ community is growing in numbers, it's natural birth control - we are on the cusp of a population crisis.

You'll need to look up misanthrophy; according to the Wikipedia page, there are moral arguments that make us not the best group to hang out with.

An interesting tale of a medical blunder! Mirrors how trans men feel and how they experience life, but I'm sure all we need to do is swap sex and gender in different ways for this story to be relatable to all.

So, in short, there doesn't seem to be a pattern except what, after reading you, seems to be the misleading one viz. men liking men and women liking women.

Perhaps we can make some headway if we break it down into possible combinations using the following characteristics:

1. Junk (penis/vagina)
2. Build (virile/effeminate)
3. Personality (virile/effeminate)
4. Genetics (XX/XY)

There are a total of 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 16 different sexuality/gender types. Which exist and which don't might give us clues to get to the bottom of the LGBTIQ phenomenon.

It's unknown to me whether all these reduce to genetics. There could be genetic defects variations that underpin it all.

Who knows, it could be an infection, maybe there's a microbe out there that messes up which gender we identify ourselves as. A Paul W. Ewald (biologist, Wikipedia has a page on him) hypothesized that schizophrenics don't find partners and start families and ergo, he claims, their prevalence in the population doesn't make any sense (the genes responsible would've been deselected over generations). The only other explanation, according to him, is that schizophrenia is an infection and he's optimistic that the causative microbe will be discovered soon. Homosexuality too doesn't make evolutionary/genetic sense (man-man and woman-woman pairs can't reproduce, they're dead ends, evolutionarily). I'll leave you to connect the dots!

For example, drop an object from a height of 100 feet. How long before it hits the ground (ignore air resistance)? Answer from acceleration due to gravity is t=2.5 and -2.5. Obviously the answer is t=2.5 seconds. — jgill

Those solutions are true for parabolas and yet the line this object traces is a straight line.

Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

Can you explain? Please.

P. S. I fear I've forgotten the formula. Is it $s = ut + \frac{1}{2}at^2$?

what it means to be a man. — Jack Cummins

A man, last I checked, is a set of physical (strong) and mental (dominating) attributes. I've simplified the attributes as they don't seem to matter to my point.

The same goes for a woman.

The physical attributes seem to be rigidly defined by genetics (XX female, XY male), but not so the mental atrributes which seem fluid in comparison.

Hence, I believe, LGBTIQ!

Note also that being strong applies to women too - some women are built like a linebacker!

It seems just having a penis is not sufficent to make one a man and possessing a vagina doesn't mean one is woman.

Fascinating!

Do I really exist or is some evil demon fooling himself into thinking I exist so that he can have fun tormenting his imaginary friend?

Not a koan for the feint of heart. — Yohan

The brain is very complex mon ami! Don't, no, not even for a single moment, assume you know what's going on.

Plus, you've committed the divine fallacy by saying what seems absurd/ridiculous to you is false.

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. — Hamlet

Are humans big in size? — Skalidris

Physically, we're somewhere at the bottom; mentally, we top the list.

The Real Meaning of the Gospels: Don't mess with the Romans!

:snicker:

Jokes aside, people seem to have converged on one word as the nub of Christianity viz. love; as to whether this is drawn from scripture or people are simply projecting their intuition, which seems to be right on the money, onto the text is open for debate.

Perhaps the notion of sacredness precedes that of god. The former makes sense even without the latter.

What do you make of the comedians' stance that for there to be peace & freedom, they should be allowed to ridicule anything and everything, that there can be no sacred cows in the modern world (re Islam and the unpleasantess vis-à-vis cartoonists and writers)?

What could possibly be more pressing than people getting their satellite dishes on the roof to watch reality TV shows of people eating bugs? — TonesInDeepFreeze

:lol:

Yet, in line with the Buddha's thoughts, we're all alone. The relations we build are, some say, fragile to the point of being mere illusions (the imagery of rats fleeing a sinking ship is enough to send shivers down me spine). That, perhaps, is what Buddha meant - the ties that bind us are maya, no self (anatta).

As @javi2541997 seems to be aware of, pantheism is probably a both selection - get the best of both worlds - by merging God with the universe. Through the universe God becomes (more) tangible and through God, the universe acquires a sanctity worthy of worship. A synergistic relationship develops due to which we can carry on worshipping God, only now He's so real!

inconsistency — TonesInDeepFreeze

Gödel? If it is consistent, it is incomplete; if it is complete, it is inconsistent.

@javi2541997 $\uparrow$

Many years ago I was watching the Academy Awards (don't ask me why I would waste my time that way). Whoopi Goldberg was at the microphone, and she said something like, "We don't need the space program. We should get rid of it. Nothing ever came out of the space program", as she was being broadcast via satellite. You gotta love it. — TonesInDeepFreeze

:rofl:

To be fair she could've been talking about our interplanetary ambitions, moon landing and all that jazz. Frankly speaking, she has a point - all that money earmarked for space ventures could be spent on more pressing matters of which, if the news is to be believed, there are many. Perhaps it's an escape plan. :chin:

To me monogamy is about division of responsibility. If it so happens that one person can take care of many, polygamy, polyandry will find a social niche to call its own.

Both end and beginning of the story :sparkle: — javi2541997

:ok:

No — jgill

Why? Well, given how math is supposedly an axiomatized system, there can be no issues with the conclusions that follow among which number the irrationals. However, that means we could play around with the axioms to disallow irrationals, oui? Is this possible/no?

There's nothing wrong with math, so it must be the universe. I wouldn't put anything past that sucker!!! — jgill

:smile: Couldn't there be something wrong with both?

We deal with the pursuit of equilibrium in our minds. Fulled by those products of union. — javi2541997

That's a sensible thing to do, but would depend, at least in part if not wholly, for some if not all, on what emerged out of the fusion of God and universe.

Also, some might be of the view that God is the universe, end of story; at no point did God exist separate from the universe and so the former becoming one with the latter is moot.

religious — Jack Cummins

Religion has issues with sexual/gender variations. Did this carry over to early psychological studies? Homosexuality was, at one point, considered a mental illness (re Alan Turing). I'm not aware of the current status of being gay in psychology. I bet it's been removed from the DSM (diagnostic & statistical manual), but hopefully in Heideggerian fashion, sous rature (to remind us of how much the world has changed over the past 2 centuries).