Even if the Exodus is completely made-up biblical writers still had this idea of disloyal demographic threat in mind. — BitconnectCarlos

:up:

They were already in slavery at the time. They weren't enslaved because they were numerous, right? Cline thinks the Exodus is a memory of the Bronze Age.

Supposedly the reason Pharaoh enslaved the ancient Israelites is because they were multiplying too much and threatening the Egyptian state demographically. — BitconnectCarlos

They sold themselves into slavery because they were experiencing famine. But that's just a myth. There's no evidence that it happened.

Yea, but Nazis hated Communists, so obviously collectivism wasn't all there was to fascism. It was also about recreating some mythical lost greatness.

US freezes almost all foreign aid

The US was the world's largest humanitarian donor. No more.

Similarly, I find that more often than not a philosophical disagreement can be, if not resolved, at least better understood by assuming the problem is a terminological dispute — J

I would say look for the conflict in temperament, the hidden emotion on the scene. What's really being attacked? defended?

would say it's more a battle between authoritarianism and liberalism. In (what is suppose to be) a free society authoritarianism is the extreme. — Harry Hindu

I think the perception is that liberalism ended up screwing people over and leaving them without reliable income or healthcare. Or the perception is that liberalism opened the door to changes people didn't want, like LGBTQ.

You want real change? Stop voting for Democrats and Republicans. — Harry Hindu

I think the real political division in the West is moderates vs. extremists, with the moderates standing for old school liberalism and democracy. The extremists could be reactionary or progressive, but they have the same drive to upset the status quo.

Yep

Okay, that is one acceptable scenario. Another acceptable scenario is that Jesus never said those words when He was on the cross. So who knows!? — MoK

Some people thought he was calling for John the Baptist. Can't remember which gospel says that. One of them.

So you think that people make up the gospel of John, — MoK

Of course.

DNA tests show that British Celts had matriarchal societies prior to the Roman invasion.. Wow!

He's not smart, but he spends a lot of money on trying to show the world that he is. — Christoffer

He's pretty smart. He founded PayPal, started Tesla, acquired Twitter, and took a seat on the cabinet just by dancing around on a stage with Trump. He has a reputation for being unstoppable.

LMAO. Same shit different page. — AmadeusD

Conflict habituated

My thought is that a belief can manifest in various ways, but that in order to count as a belief, one should be able to set out what it is that is believed - some truth, and hence some proposition. So, at the risk of opening yet another can of worms, the cat cannot hold some proposition to be true, and yet believes the mouse is behind the cupboard. We can put its belief in a propositional form. — Banno

I think propositions are part of the human form of life. Language is so central to what we are that we interact with the world using a linguistic format. When we ask the world questions, we anticipate true propositions, as if the world has a narrator. That's why propositions are generally in third person.

In analyzing the way a cat interacts with the world, we translate it into human.

Trump's first presidency was nothing special, no fascism, no World War 3, no end of days, etc. and I see no reason to believe his second will be any different. — Tzeentch

Fascism isn't really about what one guy is doing. It comes from the whole political scene. It comes from a change in attitudes toward acceptance of strong-arm strategies, and of course, acceptance of dictatorship.

The only things we can't predict, yet, is how soon the civil war begins and which side will be supported by more of the professional military - in which I include police. — Vera Mont

I doubt there will be a civil war. We're too lazy for that.

Fascinating stuff. :up:

I think it would take losing a war or a deep economic collapse. Everything else is in place, ready to go.

I think he screams before he asks this in Mark. In Mark, Jesus is the most fiery, flipping money-changing tables over, calling out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Jesus is clearly being tortured to death in Mark, and because we understand him to have been a teacher of love, it's heartbreaking, after all these centuries, if you read it, it's hard not to feel the pain. It's saying that even if you've felt this way yourself, it's not in vain, and you shall overcome.

It's obviously in direct conflict with the gospel of John in which Jesus is calm and prescient all the time. John was written later and reflects the idea that Jesus was the Son of God. That's all Neoplatonic, Stoic stuff. The original Jesus was obviously just a prophet associated with the Essenes.

Is there any sort of noun-form, or are we saying that beliefs are simply acts of believing — J

There's a thought that your body responds to speech without any intellectual filtering, so if you're coaching someone, it's better to tell them what to do rather than what not to do. The body's only response to "no" is to stop. The body can't understand "not." The intellect has to handle the issue of being wrong or mistaken because it involves imagining something and then negating it.

So maybe there's the intellect's version of belief, which is an attitude toward a proposition, and the body's version which involves unconscious testing and responding.

So at least according to the algorithmics of machine learning, beliefs and goals aren't foundational when it comes to explaining behavior, rather they are concepts concerning model-fitting strategies for determining behavioural causes and behavioural conditioning. — sime

Maybe belief is a psychological construct. It's something unobservable, but we use it to explain and predict behavior. I think the more complex the behavior is, the more likely it is that we'll explain it in terms of belief. Simple behavior could be instinct, but something like plotting revenge needs propositions for the explanation.

I don't read frank as suggesting that mass is not real. Quite the opposite. — Banno

Yes. Mass and energy are real. They're both scientific constructs.

Mass in modern physics has multiple definitions which are conceptually distinct, but physically equivalent. Mass can be experimentally defined as a measure of the body's inertia, meaning the resistance to acceleration (change of velocity) when a net force is applied.[1] The object's mass also determines the strength of its gravitational attraction to other bodies. — Wikipedia

In physics energy is not a substance, nor is it mystical. Energy is a number. A quantity. And the quantity itself isn’t even particularly fundamental. Instead, it’s a mathematical relationship between other, more fundamental quantities. It was 17th century polymath Gottfried Leibnitz who first figured out the mathematical form of what we call kinetic energy – the energy of motion. He realized that the sum of mass times velocity squared for a system of particles bouncing around on a flat surface is always conserved, assuming no friction and perfect bounciness. Leibnitz called this early incarnation of energy vis viva – the living force. — Matt O'Dowd

Figures.

The Earth doesn't orbit around the sun, nor the sun around the earth, but both orbit around a common centre of mass, under the influence of the other bodies in the solar system; and this will be so regardless of the frame of reference chosen. — Banno

There's a kind of absolutism that belongs to a theistic outlook. It's the kind of absolutism that would have a person deny something as simple as Galilean transformation. Meh.

I understand the inscrutability of reference, and more generally the indeterminancy of translation to be more or less equivalent to contextualism as opposed to relativism, because semantic indeterminancy is a theory (for want of a better word) of meta-semantics that in effect considers the meaning of a proposition to be relative to the context of the agent who asserts the proposition, and hence the public inability to know what the speaker is referring to - as opposed to relativism that is a theory of truth that considers truth to be relative to the speaker. — sime

You're absolutely right. Quine's insight was touched on earlier, but lately the thread has centered on global skepticism.

Hold up. Let's go over it a little more slowly. We just start with the realization that when we say the earth orbits the sun, we have chosen a frame of reference. Doing so requires that we choose a point and call it stationary relative to the rest of the points in the system. Are you with me so far?

Physics, not philosophy, suggests nothing is really true? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I gave you an example of a truth that's relative to the choices we make.

It's true that the earth orbits the sun if we say the sun is stationary relative to the earth. We could instead pick the earth as the stationary point and then it wouldn't be true that the earth orbits the sun. This is not rocket science guys.

Also energy and mass are constructs. They aren't observable. The list goes on.

Do you believe it's true that the earth orbits the sun? Did you know that this "truth" is relative to choices that we little people make? If there's no one to choose a frame of reference, there is no truth of the matter. This is not philosophy. It's physics.

Do you think I hold that view, Tim?

Edit: Or that such a view is implied by linguistic philosophy generally? — Banno

Everyone after Wittgenstein was deranged. Just a sad turn of events. :fear:

I very much doubt you'd find any of my thoughts about this interesting, but I'll say it anyway.

When we think about a world, the whole thing is supposed to hang together spatially and temporally. A single moment in a world implies the rest of it. So we always use the same epistemological principles for pre and post human sections of a world. It's just crazy nonsense to say that there were no divisions before humans, but divisions existed afterwards.

So in order to avoid turning the topic into something only a lobotomy patient would understand, we will jettison talk of how the world was before humans. Instead, we'll talk about what we know of the world beyond our own conceptions of it. And many a great mind has decided that the answer to that is: diddly.

:up:

People say all sorts of weird things. Which philosopher thinks that affirming language games means that nothing existed before humans?

. I don't think this implies that there is no fact about any distinct things existing in the world prior to the act of some language community. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't either. I don't think anyone thinks that.

The rules of chess are stipulated, not arbitrary. They did not pop out of the aether uncaused. How much fun is it going to be to play a game with totally arbitrary rules and victory conditions (or perhaps no victory conditions, you just move pieces around according to some random ruleset until you get bored or expire)?

Anyhow, chess comes after language. The question is how to make a language with nothing to refer to, not "if we start with a language already in hand can we make arbitrary stipulations?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

The idea is that we don't passively engage our world like blank slates upon which the world faithfully writes. It's more that we deal with one another in activities which feature linguistic rules we've agreed upon, much like we've agreed upon the rules of chess.

In other words, language doesn't come from isolated individuals treating the world out on the range like Teddy Roosevelt. Language arises from interaction with one another, much like a community of birds squawking at one another.

I guess my thoughts are: "if it was arbitrary, we wouldn't be able to agree." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Chess

fremen

:up:

But is it metaphysically possible for him to have been born of different parents? I don't think Kripke would agree (not that he's the boss). — J

I think Kripke's concern would be about someone asking about an alternative Socrates who had different parents. To my mind, whether that question would make any sense depends on the context. Since it is metaphysically possible for Socrates to have had different parents, I would say there are contexts where it would make sense. And of course others where it wouldn't.

@Banno do you disagree with that?