It's almost like they enjoy the exaggerated sensation of being in control. — Pantagruel

For a lot of people it's normal to sit watching television, eating carbs because the television is tedious and boring, probably taking some addictive benzos, so just crank up the air conditioner. I don't think they're trying to overconsume, it's just that their world is configured to keep them in that state.
Overhauling the system would be difficult to engineer.

Who are you and why are you trolling this thread?
— Mikie

People have to reduce their demand to have any hope of "solving" climate change. And even that might not be enough.
— Agree to Disagree

Seems like a perfectly reasonable position to me. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't make them a troll. Sounds more like an ad hominem to me. — Pantagruel

Plus he's right. People would have to reduce their demand.

My wife and I did a little excursion for lunch on Sunday (my Mini got 60 mpg on the trip so I don't feel so bad about that). On the way home we stopped at a rural antique store. I parked next to a giant black Ford truck that was idling, nobody in it. The people were walking around browsing the store. They just left it idling for 20 minutes or more to keep the AC going. It wasn't even that hot out.

People and their inherent stupidity, their willingness to project problems on others while completely ignoring their own culpability, are definitely at the heart of this problem. However if a majority of people won't wake up to the fact that they are causing the problem, they might still get behind initiatives to curtail production through increasingly stringent regulations, thereby indirectly regulating their own behaviours. — Pantagruel

Every year I'm amazed at the demand for air conditioning. People make their dwellings colder in the summer than they would be in the winter.

How long do you think that this will take?

I live about 1 m (metre/meter) above sea level. Currently sea level is rising by about 3 mm per year. I don't need to worry for about 333 years. Even if sea level is rising at 5mm per year I don't need to worry for about 200 years. As Bobby McFerrin sang, "Don't worry, be happy". — Agree to Disagree

It's hard to say, but you can look at what's happening now. The east coast of North America is shrinking as we speak. It's been doing that for years, so it would be a little crazy to buy property right on the beach. Rent maybe, but don't buy. I think the abrupt movements will be a result of hurricanes.

So just look around and decide based on that.

nd fossil fuels had not been used when the Greenland ice sheet melted 416,000 years ago. Something else caused it. This also suggests that we are still within normal limits for an interglacial. — Agree to Disagree

Yea. When Greenland melts again, the oceans will rise by around 20 feet.

I would aspire to something greater than simply not having people starving in the street. IMHO, the main purpose of the state is to promote the freedom of its citizens. No state is secure when its people are unhappy, and a free people will not willingly choose what makes them unhappy. America in particular suffers from an artificial division between the public and private spheres, which is itself born of a conception of freedom that focuses too much on negative freedom, and not enough on reflexive freedom and social freedom. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Lincoln's vision of freedom was about social mobility. Masters may be happy, but they aren't free because they're cemented into a particular role by law. In a free society, people can choose the role they wish to invest their spirits in. But roles are like robots: they're pre-programmed to some extent. You have to surrender to a role in order to engage the world and secure your own well-being.

A prime example of people who lost sight of their spirits is the German soldiers at the Nuremburg trials, who defended their actions by saying they were soldiers. Soldiers do what they're told. Soldier is a role, and it's correct that they do what they're told, but a human being can withdraw from the role of soldier and invest in some other. So identifying entirely with a role can result in a failure to take responsibility for one's actions.

For Lincoln, slavery wasn't evil because it made people suffer. He believed suffering is just part of any life. What made slavery evil was that it blinded people to their potential and to their responsibility.

I'm not sure if this definition of freedom fits with your analysis. It's true that free people, in Lincoln's sense of the word, choose the paths that they believe are right. If that's what you mean by "free people will not willingly choose what makes them unhappy", then we're in agreement.

ocial Freedom then is the collective resolution of these contradictions through the creation of social institutions. Institutions, the state chief among them, objectify morality in such a way that individuals’ goals align, allowing people to freely choose actions that promote each other’s freedom and wellbeing. Institutions achieve this by shaping the identities of their members, such that they derive their “feeling of selfhood” from, and recognize “[their] own essence” in, membership.”


In the language of contemporary economics, we would say that institutions change members’ tastes, shifting their social welfare function such that they increasingly weigh the welfare of others when ranking “social states.” In doing so, institutions help resolve collective action problems.

We are free when we do what it is that we want to do, and we can only be collectively free when we are guided into supporting one another's freedom. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe if you gave some real-life examples, I might understand this better. As it stands, I really have no idea what it means.

So we have incredibly rich people in the world. Is that an evil unto itself?

Yes. For two reasons.

1. There is ample evidence that high levels of economic inequality lead to a greater risk of state capture by those with wealth. In our system, wealth can buy you political power and political influence, which in turn allows the wealthy to countermand the interests and expressed policy preferences of the vast bulk of the population.

2. Inequality itself is bad because human being naturally judge themselves based on those around them; we are naturally hierarchical. Hierarchy isn't necessarily bad; divisions that are too deep are.. To put it in psychological terms, I agree with Hegel that private property plays an important role in objectifying our will to ourselves and others. Think about how you learn things about someone from the books they display in their book case, or why teens blanket their rooms in posters. But when a great deal of people's total wealth adds up to essentially nothing compared with a small cadre of elites, their property becomes irrelevant to objectifying their will. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I see what you're saying, this is what I'm seeing, though.

1) The wealthy don't need to control the US government to control the US population. They control us because they can take their jobs somewhere else if we want to play hardball. This is globalization. You can't make Americans happier by attacking the wealthy because that will increase poverty. In other words, I think the solution you're reaching for would have to be global. It would require a global government. There isn't one.

Thanks so much for your post. It was a really interesting read.

:cool:

"By convention" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, with that in mind. Isn't that like pointing to the public shelf of meaning? — Moliere

Yes. It is. Is that bad?

True, but he is able to borrow against the value and spend what he has borrowed. So, it's like he has sold the stock, functionally anyhow, but he doesn't have to pay taxes on it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My point was that if we want to tax Bezo's wealth, we'll have to have a progressive federal property tax. Income tax wouldn't do it.

The problem here goes beyond just tax avoidance though. Human ability tends to follow a roughly normal distribution. Wealth follows a power law distribution. This gets down to the issue of returns on capital generating a system where inequality expands if positive action isn't taken. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So far, the main force resulting in redistribution is the occasional economic collapse, like the Great Depression. Those events reset everything. I've lately started thinking that leftism has always been a kind of cultural phantom. It appears to be there, but it's not real. All of the victories assigned to the left were actually the result of various catastrophic events. Or maybe I just have the apolitical blues.

Obviously, this is not the way to do things, but there is something interesting about the idea of firms that are "large enough," being partly owned by the public (or by the workers at said firms, having unions on the boards, something done in Germany, etc.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

We have the postal service. :razz: And we have a heavily regulated financial industry.

In any event, the labor share of all income in developed countries has been trending down for half a century now. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That may be true, but most of us aren't doing that badly. We aren't starving, for the most part. We don't live in shanty towns unless we particularly want to. I guess my question would be: what really is the problem we're hoping to fix?

We will probably see over 50% of all income go to capital in the medium term. This is bad news for places with high wealth inequality. E.g., American income inequality is not nearly as bad as wealth inequality, where the top 1% owns 15+ times the share of the bottom 50%, and 90+% of all stocks and bonds are owned by the top 10%. AI will probably also have the effect of making returns on capital outpace wage growth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So we have incredibly rich people in the world. Is that an evil unto itself? Or is it that we need those funds to help people who are actually starving? How are you looking at it?

Excellent summary there. — unenlightened

Thanks!

Yup, that fits the form. The original question was with respect to gender-identity, but the form is there.

The one thing about the form that might elude the original disagreement is that "Jack is a dog" can be read not just as an identity-statement, but also as a description. It'd depend upon the context -- if the question is "Did you buy a cat or a dog?" then that's a description, but if Jack is running around the yard barking like dogs do, and so you express "Jack is a dog" then that's an identity-statement. — Moliere

I'm sorry, I'm out of the loop on what the original disagreement was. If the question is asked: "Is that a dog?", the meaning of the uttered sentence is partly a matter of context and partly about what we pick out as dogs by convention.

I thought that at one point, though sometimes I flirt with the notion too. But it is absurd, I understand. (though the world is too by my reckoning, so there are worse conclusions) — Moliere

:grin:

When the truth is that Wittgenstein was such a philosopher's philosopher that it's best to reserve judgments from thinking he supports this or that thing we care about. (early on cutting my teeth on W. I did the same thing -- seeing connections to leftist politics and all that. Eventually I figured out that that part was all me just trying to grasp the thoughts of a genius mind. It's an easy mistake to make with the greats) — Moliere

Some commentary I read said that a high percentage of interpretations are based on reading in ideas not expressed by W. Maybe that stuff ends up being more interesting than W. himself.

but I do think the PLA has a bearing on some common thoughts about the meaning of identity-statements — Moliere

Like "Jack is a dog"? That kind of statement?

Keep in mind that in one article you posted, the data only went back to 1980. In the other it was 1991. Any legit scientist would tell you that's not enough data to say something about the climate, so the use of "anomalous" doesn't mean what it appears to. Watch out for articles like that.

Did you see they discovered that the Greenland ice sheet melted 416,000 years ago? That was in a previous interglacial, which is kind of astounding. It means the period we're in is on the mild side. The Greenland ice sheet could melt and we'd still be within normal limits for an interglacial.

My uncertainty is more to do with how meaning becomes public than whether it is. Or, since private meaning is a nonsense a how question for publicity is likewise nonsense, how is meaning shared? — Moliere

One of my pet peeves is the way the Private Language Argument is misinterpreted on this site. Some people do it over and over and that misinterpretation spreads. The argument only suggests that you can't have a language that is untranslatable even in principle. This has no bearing whatsoever on whether you can make up your own words for things, or have your own private thoughts which you never share with others.

So yes, you can make up words that you never tell others about. The reason you have no trouble keeping your private language straight is that it's resting on a shared language, which has rules that you learn from others.

Language use can be broken down into these parts:

Utterances: these are the actual sounds you make, or the marks you create when you write.
Sentences: these are formal entities, like The cat is on the mat. Imagine you have a group of friends who have decided to use "The cat is on the mat" as a code for You have spinach in your teeth.

You can see that the meaning of the sentence depends on the context of utterance. This is always true.

Propositions: In the case of your group of friends who have used a sentence as a code, the proposition expressed by "The cat is on the mat" is that you have spinach in your teeth. So propositions are the meanings of uttered sentences. If you take the sentence out of context and just focus on it as a formal entity, though it may have a logical meaning, it doesn't have any specific meaning.

This is the importance of saying that meaning is use. Look to use to discern meaning. Look at the setting of the utterance of "It's a small number" to discern what proposition is being expressed. Meaning is use does not mean that meaning is the actual utterances. That's absurd, but there are people on this forum who will blow through that absurdity and assert it anyway.

There's a spectrum between creativity and orthodoxy. Go too far in either direction and you have bullshit.

They'd have a vaccine pretty quickly: that's the cool thing about the mRNA technology.

The Earned Income Tax Credit is a nice way of redistributing wealth. — RogueAI

Economic disasters have a proven track record.

Because abstract reasoning requires symbols, no? — Janus

Is that your argument?

Is abstract reasoning not all and only a matter of language use? — Janus

Why would it be?

When it says his wealth increased, that means his Amazon stock increased in value. That's not income or even real money until he sells the stocks.

It seems as if there's an epidemic of imagination loss going around. Is open war the only alternative to non-resistance? — Isaac

If course not. I think the whole world should bow down to the majesty of the US military due to the realization that nonviolent resistance is key.

I think of this whole thing as giving the lie to the libertarian (or anarcho-capitalist) worldview that trade and commerce and markets are natural and self-sustaining. They're not. They must be enabled by institutions that keep the peace and enforce property rights. If they are not, some warlord will just take your grain and sell it as his own, or just blockade your ports so you can't sell it, or bomb them into rubble. — Srap Tasmaner

I think it's a matter of population density. If it's a few people transporting silk from China to Egypt in 1000 BC, they probably won't meet anybody on the trip. As the density increases, merchants can pay warlords for protection, or in the case of Islam, religion is merchant law and all the merchants have armies. Once the merchant class takes over the world, they can offload the cost of protecting their trade to society in general. So it's never been that societies create governments and that makes trade possible. It's the other way around. Where there is trade, there are roads and communication. Communication gives rise to innovation as good ideas come together. I'm just saying it's a rose with thorns, not just a big thorn, though that might be the way it seems sometimes.

I think they’re going to do even worse next year. — Quixodian

I hope so. We'll see.

Gift article from the Washington Post about how the continued GOP defense of Trump is going to cost the party. — Quixodian

I have a subscription to the WaPo. A couple of things that editorial doesn't mention: yes, gen-z'ers are coming of age to vote. The problem is: they won't. Young people don't vote in numbers that compare to older voters. This was discussed back when Trump was originally elected with regard to millennials.

The other thing that writer doesn't seem to notice is how much power Trump still has, after everything that's happened. It's not that all Republicans are crazy. It's that the crazy ones have all the power right now.

There's nothing controversial about any of this. If people who don't want Trump don't get out and vote, he'll have a second term

Your faith is touching, but I'm not falling for the schtick. — Quixodian

:rofl: What a weird thing to say.

In the polls. But as I said above, there are many, many other factors in play in this case. — Quixodian

Like the law suits? That won't stop him.

Zero chance — Quixodian

He's the frontrunner, so he'll probably be up against Biden. So his chances are about 50%. That's how close presidential elections are here.

He would be on a loosing trajectory even without having to juggle multiple federal and state lawsuits. — Quixodian

He's the frontrunner, so he's not on a losing trajectory. He has a good chance of beating Biden.

Let’s remember the fact that the Never Trumpers damn near kneecapped Trump at the 2016 Convention. You can only imagine what will happen at the 2024 Convention if he were the nominee (which I’m sure he won’t be.) — Quixodian

He's the frontrunner. He'll be there. There's a good chance he'll be the next president.

That's alright, I never understood the point of your responses from the start of the present conversation. — Janus

Inscrutability of reference probably.

It may be interesting in the context of the history of ideas. I know Christianity absorbed and repurposed some Neoplatonic ideas, but there is no personal God in Neoplatonism, so the central plank is derived from elsewhere. — Janus

I've lost track of your point.

But that wouldn't explain why we both got the joke. — Moliere

I think maybe Quine isn't your cuppa tea. :razz:

How about you present them and then we can discuss them. I don't believe they were arguments for God as conceived by the Christian founders, but I am aware that they were adapted to support their Christian theology. — Janus

You have it backward, Janus. Christianity as we know it was adapted to Neoplatonism, the dominant philosophical view of the time, not the other way around. God, as the Christian founders conceived it, is Neoplatonic. Augustine actually read Aristotle. Ancient Greek philosophy is in the underpinnings of Christianity. See how interesting the topic is?

I don't have an "expert opinion" since I am not a scholar of Ancient Greek philosophy, but the argument from first causes, for example, presupposes the ancient's understanding of causation. Also, unless I am mistaken, Aristotle did not argue for God, but for a "Prime Mover" or demiurge. — Janus

He had multiple proofs of God. Aquinas' proofs are modeled on them. The Christian founders approved of the use of ancient Greek philosophers in Christian thinking. What's your expert opinion on that?

Sure, but that is "a shared context of faith": scholastic philosophers presupposed the validity of orthodox theology. — Janus

Aristotle made proofs of God as well. What's your expert opinion on that?

Treating religious stories as literature, which may convey wisdom, as any good literature may, is not the same as arguing pointlessly over the existence of God or gods or the reality of ideas like karma or rebirth. — Janus

Scholastic philosophers taught the skill of argumentation by having students create proofs of God on their own, and their arguments would be critiqued. For a newbie, it's very fertile ground. It's like a philosophy gymnasium.

A joke, yes, but with a point -- it's true we understand one another in this conversation, I believe.

Given the indeterminacy of translation, how do we understand one another? — Moliere

I guess Quine would have us deflate "understand."

Like this:

I agree. — Moliere

ha

Im So insofar that there's no reason to disbelieve then you're probably close enough to count for "really agreeing" as opposed to "apparently agreeing". — Moliere

Apparently there is reason to disbelieve:

Indeterminacy of translation

In any conversation -- I think that makes sense. We usually end conversations when there's too much disagreement or we're confused. — Moliere

It looks like we agree. How would you determine that we really do think the same things? As opposed to just appearing to?

I think it was John Fowles who said Great Expectations sums up the main points of Christianity. I agree.

So, I am asking here about what has been the influence of Gnosticism, especially in views about the role of sexuality in the development of Christian thinking? — Jack Cummins

"Gnosticism" is a term that religion experts came up with to group together a collection of early Christian sects. A common feature is a divinity called Sophia, who falls out of heaven and spawns a blind god called Samael. This blind god is the creator of our world and you could say he's either evil or just insane. We might say insane because he doesn't mean to be evil. Samael and Yahweh are supposed to be the same guy.

German religion scholars used to be passionate about discovering the origin of the imagery in Gnostic Christianity and finally decided it was so far back as to be undiscoverable, especially when they discovered some similar imagery in Pacific Northwest native American religions, which would make the origin at least 10,000 years ago. Other scholars have claimed that trying to find an origin is a mistake, that these images bubble up from a common psychic substrate. This would be a kind of structuralism.

It's kind of hard to miss the powerful veins of feeling in the Grail stories, but those stories came from one French guy around the 12th Century. He was a professional story teller. Within 50 years of his death, there were Grail stories all over Europe, with each teller adding unique twists to it. I think we could compare it to science fiction fixtures in our world. Think about zombie apocalypse themes that have pervaded for the last decade or so. Those images are probably also appearing from lower levels of the psyche.