I aim to cause alarm, rather than playing 'abide with me' while the ship sinks. — unenlightened

I appreciate and honor that. I'm not alarmed. I'm just kind of heartbroken. I think the most actionable path would be fusion r+d. As the article @jgill posted said, a fair amount of the presently adopted "to do" list is pointless gesturing.

Not to worry — some guy on the internet says everything will be fine!” — Mikie

I didn't say everything will be fine. I compared the coming event to the end of the Bronze Age. The only social collapse that compares to that is the fall of Rome.

There’s still the hothouse earth scenario, — Mikie

That's not a thing.

Listen to experts who study extinctions:

If I'm to say, what do I think is the biggest contributor to the potential for human extinction going towards the future? Then climate change, no doubt.
— Luke Kemp — Mikie

Context?

There’s very good reason to believe this could cause human extinction, — Mikie

No.

I'm into the Third Meditation. I'm reading and rereading it to get the whole thing to hang together.

Should we go through it a step at a time? Or just present ideas about what the whole thing means? What do you think it means?

So it is pretty bad, though not literally the end. — Manuel

I agree with that. I think it will be like the end of the Bronze Age. Lots of wars, displaced people, breakdown of the global community.

Yes, and we can't predict, a-priori, how bad it will be on top of the already burning ocean, so it's a kind of Russian roulette. — Manuel

There's no reason to believe climate change will cause human extinction. Primates originally evolved at the poles during the PETM. The surface was hotter then than it will be during the whole AGW episode.

But one thing I've found: the belief that we're facing the end is very strong. I think those who hold that belief are doing so for a reason I don't totally understand.

This is going to be an El Nino year. It's going to be pretty warm.

Then they had a fight and all died. — unenlightened

:groan:

:cool:

On a tiny island lived a little village where no one knew of the outside world. They thought there was nothing but water in all directions forever.

At night they would sit by the fire and sing songs to the moon.

One night, while the village crowded round the fire, one young man spoke up and said he believed the moon belonged to him.

The crowd stared at him, but as he spoke of a revelation that had come to him in form of a bright light, some approved, for they had long believed in lights that speak hidden truths. But others in the village thought it was ridiculous. They scoffed and laughed behind his back. "If any one of us owns the moon, it's not that moron" they said, and laughed heartily.

In time the village became divided, with competing theories about who had a right to claim the moon and why. Over the years the division went deeper and people used it as an excuse to vent frustration and disappointment. The world would go back to paradise if only the other side was gone.

Finish the story as you see fit.

One of the advantages to anarchic organizing, like the conversational model I proposed, is that organizations don't outlive their use. — Moliere

What would be an example of an organization outliving its use?

It's just funny to me comparing the reality of anarchy with anarchists (endless communication and meetings and collective decision making) to the picture (propaganda of the deed, revolution, CHAOS). — Moliere

Do real anarchists have meetings? Honestly, I don't know what their goal is. But I have the same problem with Marxists.

Living anarchically is a form of organization unto itself, and is usually more about who is going to wash the toilets and take care of the chickens and buy the groceries and distributing out the tasks in a collective manner. — Moliere

I suppose it would be. Seems like things would get bloody from time to time.

I’m not so sure of anarchism yet but I definitely wish to promote self-government and the rule of people over their own lives. The problem with democracy, from Plato onward, is that the state is always assumed in its realization. It might be that democracy is a one-to-one ratio with anarchy, hence why Plato and later conservatives thought it would lead invariably to some kind of anarchy. — NOS4A2

90% of the population of Athens were slaves. Plato didn't know shit about democracy.

But that thing you describe from time to time, where there's no government? That's anarchy. It's a time-honored position, though it's usually on the fringes. Anarchist sometimes influence events with the threat of violence, as during the Haymarket incident.

. Suppose a given institution remains democratic after a year, is that a falsification of the "Law"? Perhaps we shoudl wait ten years? If an institution remains democratic after a hundred years, do we consider the law falsified? Any institution that remains democratic is not a falsification, since it can be claimed that it still will become an oligarchy. Hence the supposed law is inherently unfalsifiable. — Banno

If we say that there are strong forces in any democracy toward oligarchy (and I think there are), then that still serves NOS's purposes, which is to promote anarchy.

So putting it simply, even if we accept that there is a trend in democratic institutions towards centralisation of power, humans can choose to work against that trend. — Banno

People do work against that trend, but the greatest threat to any oligarchy is the habits of the ruling class, not voters. Oligarchs end up squeezing a society until some kind of breakdown occurs. The next phase isn't more democracy, it's dictatorship.

Or if you're in Russia, you just proceed from a fake democracy, through a fake oligarchy, straight to what the people really want: a monarchy.

The sphere of the utterance thus includes that which in every speech act, refers exclusively to its taking place, to its instance, independently and prior to what is said meant in it. — Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death, The Place of Negativity, pg 17

Yes. The copy of the Meditations you're reading is an utterance. An utterance is sounds or marks.

Pronouns and the other indicators of the utterance, before they designate real objects, indicate precisely that language takes place. In this way, still prior to the world of meaning, they permit the reference to the very event of language, the only context in which something can only be signified. — Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death, The Place of Negativity, pg 17

I agree. It's by the utterance of a sentence that a proposition is expressed.

Comments on the Second Meditation:


For Descartes, a certain truth is one that can't be doubted. It's as if there's a spectrum with absolute certainty on one side and pure doubt on the other. Per the SEP:

In the Second Replies, he adds:

"First of all, as soon as we think that we correctly perceive something, we are spontaneously convinced that it is true. Now if this conviction is so firm that it is impossible for us ever to have any reason for doubting what we are convinced of, then there are no further questions for us to ask: we have everything that we could reasonably want. … For the supposition which we are making here is of a conviction so firm that it is quite incapable of being destroyed; and such a conviction is clearly the same as the most perfect certainty. (AT 7:144f, CSM 2:103)

These passages (and others) suggest an account wherein doubt is the contrast of certainty.As my certainty increases, my doubt decreases; conversely, as my doubt increases, my certainty decreases. The requirement that knowledge is to be based in complete, or perfect certainty, thus amounts to requiring a complete inability to doubt one’s convictions – an utter indubitability. This conception of the relationship between certainty and doubt helps underwrite Descartes’ methodical emphasis on doubt, the so-called ‘method of doubt’ (discussed in Section 2). — SEP on Descartes' Epistemology

Having put aside uncertain propositions, he focuses now on what he couldn't doubt: that he exists.

But what about the "I" is indubitable? He lists things that come to mind about what he is: he's a man with a body. But he finds that this falls to the evil demon.

So what's left? His conclusion is astonishing, in a way. He starts with pondering what wax really is:

Perhaps what I now think about the wax indicates what its nature was all along. If that is right, then the wax was not the sweetness of the honey, the scent of the flowers, the whiteness, the shape, or the sound, but was rather a body that recently presented itself to me in those ways but now appears differently. But what exactly is this thing that I am now imagining? Well, if we take away whatever doesn’t belong to the wax (that is, everything that the wax could be without), what is left is merely something extended, flexible and changeable. What do ‘flexible’ and ‘changeable’ mean here? I can imaginatively picture this piece of wax changing from round to square, from square to triangular, and so on. But that isn’t what changeability is. In knowing that the wax is changeable I understand that it can go through endlessly many changes of that kind, far more than I can depict in my imagination; so it isn’t my imagination that gives me my grasp of the wax as flexible and changeable. Also, what does ‘extended’ mean? Is the wax’s extension also unknown? It increases if the wax melts, and increases again if it boils; the wax can be extended in many more ways (that is, with many more shapes) than I will ever bring before my imagination. I am forced to conclude that the nature of this piece of wax isn’t revealed by my imagination, but is perceived by the mind alone. (I am speaking of this particular piece of wax; the point is even clearer with regard to wax in general.) This wax that is perceived by the mind alone is, of course, the same wax that I see, touch, and picture in my imagination – in short the same wax I thought it to be from the start. But although my perception of it seemed to be a case of vision and touch and imagination, it isn’t so and it never was. Rather, it is purely a perception by the mind alone – formerly an imperfect and confused one, but now clear and distinct because I am now concentrating carefully on what the wax consists in. — Descartes, Second Meditation

He concludes that wax is none of the everchanging properties a piece of wax may have. The wax itself, is an idea. I realize that interpretation of what he's saying is up for debate. Debate!

See! With no effort I have reached the place where I wanted to be! I now know that even bodies are perceived not by the senses or by imagination but by the intellect alone, not through their being touched or seen but through their being understood; and this helps me to understand that I can perceive my own mind more easily and clearly than I can anything else. Since the grip of old opinions is hard to shake off, however, I want to pause and meditate for a while on this new knowledge of mine, fixing it more deeply in my memory. — Descartes, Second Meditation

The ego is an idea. Right?

Given that I read what I was going to read concerning Descartes "Rules for the Direction of Mind", I'll instead go directly to the Meditations, so as to be able to contribute more directly, instead of relying on memory. — Manuel

Cool. Looking forward to your comments.

There's a theory that the queen of an ant colony is the colony's sex organ. The colony is a single individual with semi-autonomous parts.

Your body has only one citizen who can move on its on: macrophages. But it's still a diverse population of entities.

So you actually are an aggregate. That's pretty common on earth.

Thanks for moving ahead. I was working. :grin:

he does not start to prove the existence of the self, but to “prove” anything, to be certain in any regard. He has merely retreated to here. — Antony Nickles

I agree. It's not an argument. He's not trying to persuade anyone. An argument would be out of place because we launch arguments for propositions that are in doubt. That's the whole point of an argument.

Descartes isn't offering any justification or foundation for "I exist." This is indubitable.

But then he goes on to refine the "I" that must exist.

For some people, individuality is seen as evil. Not sure why. Some would go so far as to claim that individuality is an illusion, that all there is is the collective.

The psyche is a strange land.

You see how strange it is that knowledge is innumerable and that there are people who know more? — Moliere

Yes. And then there's Meno's paradox:

If you know what you're looking for, inquiry is unnecessary. If you don't know what you're looking for, inquiry is impossible

I think there might be something like latent knowledge, maybe part of the structure of mental processing, that develops with socialization. It occurred to me as a child that I can't teach someone what blue is. They just have to experience it for themselves. A lot of math is like that too. You can't drill a hole in someone's head and pour it in, they have to discover it for themselves, again, as if they already knew it and the math teacher is just pointing to the knowledge to help them gain consciousness of it.

If that's true, that we all have the same (or similar?) latent knowledge, then what's left is the novel and the unique. But think about how you would tell someone about something that is truly unique. If it's completely outside their experience, I don't think you'll be able to convey it. You'd have to try to compare it to something they do know about.

In comparison to the set of real numbers is it a bigger or smaller infinite? — Moliere

I think it would just resist quantization. The universe has no size.

It could be that knowledge is innumerable, which I suspect, but then how do we get to comparing people who have more or less? — Moliere

We can probably only guage the extent of a person's knowledge about a certain topic. The plumber knows more about pipes. The homeless junkie knows more about how to find a place to sleep.

But that is an entirely different thread. — Manuel

True. :cool:

Some would say knowledge is identical to actions (or inaction as the case may be.)

Everything either acts or doesn't, so basically the size of Knowledge is the size of the universe. But the universe is probably infinite.

Thanks for posting from Meditation 2. I just wanted to comment on this last portion of the first Meditation before moving on:

It isn’t enough merely to have noticed this, though; I must make an effort to remember it. My old familiar opinions keep coming back, and against my will they capture my belief. It is as though they had a right to a place in my belief-system as a result of long occupation and the law of custom. It is true that these habitual opinions of mine are highly probable; although they are in a sense doubtful, as I have shown, it is more reasonable to believe than to deny them. But if I go on viewing them in that light I shall never get out of the habit of confidently assenting to them. To conquer that habit, therefore, I had better switch right around and pretend (for a while) that these former opinions of mine are utterly false and imaginary. I shall do this until I have something to counter-balance the weight of old opinion, and the distorting influence of habit no longer prevents me from judging correctly. However far I go in my distrustful attitude, no actual harm will come of it, because my project won’t affect how I act, but only how I go about acquiring knowledge.

So I shall suppose that some malicious, powerful, cunning demon has done all he can to deceive me – rather than this being done by God, who is supremely good and the source of truth. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely dreams that the demon has contrived as traps for my judgment. I shall consider myself as having no hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as having falsely believed that I had all these things. I shall stubbornly persist in this train of thought; and even if I can’t learn any truth, I shall at least do what I can do, which is to be on my guard against accepting any falsehoods, so that the deceiver – however powerful and cunning he may be – will be unable to affect me in the slightest. This will be hard work, though, and a kind of laziness pulls me back into my old ways.

Like a prisoner who dreams that he is free, starts to suspect that it is merely a dream, and wants to go on dreaming rather than waking up, so I am content to slide back into my old opinions; I fear being shaken out of them because I am afraid that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake, and that I shall have to struggle not in the light but in the imprisoning darkness of the problems I have raised." — Descartes, First Meditation

@Manuel Notice how he's foreshadowing Hume's answer to the problem of induction? We seem to be bound by habits of belief, so that even if you decided to doubt everything you know, you'd find yourself "pulled back into the old ways."

So now he goes into the "imprisoning darkness" of the problems he has raised.

Another thing aristocracy has in common with liberal democracy is that both find that depriving the common people so they're on the verge of dying from starvation helps get those little worker bees moving.

If you let them be satisfied, they'll just sit there eating pumpkins. Get rid of the pumpkins and take all their stuff away. They'll work like maniacs.

I've done a citizen's ban on you, by the way. I talked to you about your behavior and just couldn't get through to you. So, don't whine because I won't be able to hear you and you brought it on yourself. You committed suicide by citizen.

Not really the topic for En Vogue references, but I’m a big fan. — NOS4A2

:joke:

I think that is the key, in the end. Rather than wasting time devising a collectivist system that ought to deliver the rule of the people (an absurdity, as Michels shows), which in practice is oligarchy, the people just need to go rule themselves. — NOS4A2

Free your mind. The rest will follow.

Exactly right. Democracy is only achievable outside of representational government. And I do not think we need to go backwards in order to remove the shackles of another’s rule. In the meantime I guess we can pretend it is democracy, protect our “democratic institutions”, and go on as if we’re not serfs for the time being. — NOS4A2

Or you can be realistic about the times you live in and recognize that your time on this little rock is short. How do you want to spend it? And do it. :up:

“It was a tenet of the old aristocracy that to disobey the orders of the monarch was to sin against God. In modern democracy it is held that no one may disobey the orders of the oligarchs, for in so doing the people sin against themselves, defying their own will spontaneously transferred by them to their representatives, and thus infringing democratic principle. — NOS4A2

True. The government took the place of the aristocracy. To the extent that leftists want the government to ensure (enforce) social welfare, they're almost indistinguishable from peasants appealing to the boyar or whatever. You really ought to read the recent posts of @Count Timothy von Icarus He lays out pretty well the advantages of democratic societies (if only democratic in a limited sense) in terms of innovation. He's exactly right.

For better or worse, we can't voluntarily return to the Bronze Age, which is what you'd have to do to escape modern social structures. Anyway, that's a static kind of life where nothing changes for millennia. But hey, the problem of global warming would be solved.

This is a quick Wikipedia article on the medieval conception of God.

Religion certainly served pragmatic functions in many societies. It can serve to legitimize the state (e.g., the deification of Roman emperors), it can act as a check on absolutist states (e.g., Saint Ambrose forcing Emperor Theodosius to wear penitent's robes and undergo chastisement after the massacre at Thessalonica), it can act as a legal arbiter (e.g., Saint Augustine mentions much of his time being sucked up by arbitrating property disputes, estates, etc.), it can help solve collective action problems when pushing for reforms (e.g., the central role of churches in the US Civil Rights Movement, and earlier, the Abolitionist movement), and it can help provide public goods in low capacity states (e.g., churches were the main source of welfare programs and education for the lower classes in Europe for over a millennia).

Civil society organizations and the state can also provide these goods. What makes religion and philosophy unique is their ability to give people a narrative about the meaning and purpose of life, an explanation of their inner lives and the natural world.

This is something religion aims at, but also philosophy, and the two can be quite close in this respect. A world view based on Nietzschean overcoming requires that the world be valueless and meaningless for the human to become great by triumphing over this apparent emptiness. A world where man is essentially evil and always on the verge of extinction is required for the somber rationalists to triumph over the immanent disasters by building a just structure in the world despite the opposition of the legions of the selfish. Marxism also is able to offer a religious-like, all encompassing vision of the purpose of human life, one which also ends in salvation.

This is ultimately where I think the instinct to hold on to and defend dogmas comes from. They become like blocks in an arch, kick them out and the edifice collapses. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up: :up: :up:

:up:

Next in the first Meditation, he presents this argument for why I might be wrong about "2+5=7"

However, I have for many years been sure that there is an all-powerful God who made me to be the sort of creature that I am. How do I know that he hasn’t brought it about that there is no earth, no sky, nothing that takes up space, no shape, no size, no place, while making sure that all these things appear to me to exist? Anyway, I sometimes think that others go wrong even when they think they have the most perfect knowledge; so how do I know that I myself don’t go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square? Well, you might say·, God would not let me be deceived like that, because he is said to be supremely good. But, I reply, if God’s goodness would stop him from letting me be deceived all the time, you would expect it to stop him from allowing me to be deceived even occasionally; yet clearly I sometimes am deceived.

Some people would deny the existence of such a powerful God rather than believe that everything else is uncertain. Let us grant them – for purposes of argument – that there is no God, and theology is fiction. On their view, then, I am a product of fate or chance or a long chain of causes and effects. But the less powerful they make my original cause, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect as to be deceived all the time – because deception and error seem to be imperfections. Having no answer to these arguments, I am driven back to the position that doubts can properly be raised about any of my former beliefs. I don’t reach this conclusion in a flippant or casual manner, but on the basis of powerful and well thought-out reasons. So in future, if I want to discover any certainty, I must withhold my assent from these former beliefs just as carefully as I withhold it from obvious falsehoods. — Descartes, First Meditation

In modern language, he's just saying that it's metaphysically possible that he could be in circumstances where he's wrong about arithmetic. A divinity could create those conditions.

He answers an objection to this, that the divinity he's describing can't exist because God is loving. God wouldn't do that to His creations. Descartes answers that if that were true, he should never find himself deceived.

Another objection is to the framework of metaphysical possibility: one could just deny that there is any divinity at all, so remove the primary power of that kind of possibility. Descartes answers that this doesn't bring us back to certainty, though. Without a divinity, Descartes says he would be left at the extremity of imperfection (divinity basically is existence and perfection), and so it's more likely that he would be deceived all of the time.

So up to this point, we've lost confidence in the certainty of

1. that this is my hand
2. that 2+3=5
3. that there is any earth, sky, space, shape, size, place, etc.

Nice pick on the Gnossiennes. More romantic and less modern in a weird way, in comparison to the more popular Gymnopedies, which I love as well. Both equally great to my ear. — Noble Dust

I really like the tempo of that performance. Some people play it really slowly or quickly. In this performance the notes seem to be describing a semi-random event. It also sounds Jewish to me for some reason.

You for some reason reminded me of this underrated and very unknown English composer of the time: — Noble Dust

Cool..

:up:

Next is Descartes' reasoning for why he could be wrong about whether the hand in front of him is his hand:

What a brilliant piece of reasoning! As if I were not a man who sleeps at night and often has all the same experiences while asleep as madmen do when awake – indeed sometimes even more improbable ones. Often in my dreams I am convinced of just such familiar events – that I am sitting by the fire in my dressing-gown – when in fact I am lying undressed in bed! Yet right now my eyes are certainly wide open when I look at this piece of paper; I shake my head and it isn’t asleep; when I rub one hand against the other, I do it deliberately and know what I am doing. This wouldn’t all happen with such clarity to someone asleep.

"Indeed! As if I didn’t remember other occasions when I have been tricked by exactly similar thoughts while asleep! As I think about this more carefully, I realize that there is never any reliable way of distinguishing being awake from being asleep.

"This discovery makes me feel dizzy, which itself reinforces the notion that I may be asleep! Suppose then that I am dreaming – it isn’t true that I, with my eyes open, am moving my head and stretching out my hands. Suppose, indeed that I don’t even have hands or any body at all." — Descartes, First Meditation

So don't really have to be a madman to doubt that your hand is really yours. You could be asleep right now. There doesn't appear to be any criteria for determining if what's happening to you now is a dream or reality. But then, dreams imply a world that's been copied by the mind:

Still, it has to be admitted that the visions that come in sleep are like paintings: they must have been made as copies of real things; so at least these general kinds of things – eyes, head, hands and the body as a whole – must be real and not imaginary. For even when painters try to depict sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they simply jumble up the limbs of different kinds of real animals, rather than inventing natures that are entirely new. If they do succeed in thinking up something completely fictitious and unreal – not remotely like anything ever seen before – at least the colours used in the picture must be real. Similarly, although these general kinds of things – eyes, head, hands and so on – could be imaginary, there is no denying that certain even simpler and more universal kinds of things are real. These are the elements out of which we make all our mental images of things – the true and also the false ones.

These simpler and more universal kinds include body, and extension; the shape of extended things; their quantity, size and number; the places things can be in, the time through which they can last, and so on.

So it seems reasonable to conclude that physics, astronomy, medicine, and all other sciences dealing with things that have complex structures are doubtful; while arithmetic, geometry and other studies of the simplest and most general things – whether they really exist in nature or not – contain something certain and indubitable. For whether I am awake or asleep, two plus three makes five, and a square has only four sides. It seems impossible to suspect that such obvious truths might be false. — Descartes, First Meditation

So our doubts continue to develop. Now what seems indubitable is that two plus three makes five. How could that be wrong?

:up: