I doubt that is what a person would think. I am being a bit fussy, since you might be able to change the wording to make it seem more believable to me, but it just strikes me as too rational. I have weighed the suffering and I now choose to give myself over. The little conscious thinky thingie in the forebrain would be noticing the decision the bulk of its unconscious made for it.

Yes, I agree. Some people would choose to stop. *I am going to talk sooner or later* my holding out does nothing and it's hell*

Sure.

My main point is that there is a kind of blaming the victim in saying that 'really' they could have held out and they 'chose' to give in, they were not forced. I don't think that's useful or correct. It's also got a kind of, to me, magical Arnold Swartzenegger macho fantasy in it.

The psychic driving experiments by that sick doctor in Canada showed one pattern where you shatter the personality and break the person down into an open scared near personalityless human. Then you start filling in stuff. I read a book a long time ago by one women who went through this. She did manage to get her self back to some degree - though she was forever damaged psychically. I'd guess that secret programs have built on that guy's work and the work of others.

However, the individual does not need to remove oneself from society, nor avoid human contact in order to isolate, or enter the cave — Merkwurdichliebe

I agree, and the fact that you came up with something like REddy's critique of how language works means that you managed to get around a cultural bias. One can use other people, books, movies, great art often undercuts assumptions, science, meditation, relationships with people from other cultures, relationships with animals and so on to undermine biases and also, first, to make them visible. I am not saying we cannot change.

No offense meant. I was simply being facetious in implying you held that position, I didn't really think you held it. Consider it a bad attempt at a bad joke. — Merkwurdichliebe

Ah, ok, no worries, thanks for explaining.

Loving sure has not worked. I did not qualify my views as the only approach. Stop putting you lies into my mouth, please. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Oh, sure you did. Since I disagreed I MUST be ignoring the problem. So, if I don't agree with your approach, this entails that I cannot see the problem out there. Hence it could be the only approach. Read you own shit and take responsibility for your own mistakes in assumption. You act like something is entailed by what I wrote, when it isn't. If I don't agree with you the only possible cause is I don't notice the problem. Get it. Your assumptions.

Stop putting you lies into my mouth, please. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Duh. This from the guy who is telling me what I am not noticing when I do. Who is instructing me to correcteth, when I obviously do. You imply and assert shit all the time about other people. Taste of your own.

I never indicated it was while quoting that it is the loving thing to do. Reading comprehension is good. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

That first sentence is pretty much unitelligible. In the context of our discussion about hating ourselves, you plop in a quote from scripture - appealing to the authority of books that you consider to be problematic - about a father correcting.

As if anything I said implied one should not correct or correcteth someone.

You implicitly conflated correcting someone with hating them.

Again, no responsibility for your own sloppy thinking as assumptions.

As to your personal psychobabble. Shove it. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I did, right up yours.

And no response of substance at all anywhere, as per usual. Just shifting to other things, reasserting yourself and denying.

You are not a person who has the answers to saving the world.

You can't even manage a decent discussion without your surly assumptive bs.

Yes, I think everyone would break. And in his example, the POWs the Japanese had, they generally just tortured them. They suffered, some broke, some did not. But when you are really trying to work on the mind, you are not simply torturing. You are trying to shatter their sense of self in a variety of ways, weaken the mind via loss of sleep and nutrition, but also, after a time, begin to replace thoughts. I do think one can recover from someting like that. IOW I do not think you can count on creating Manchurian candidates who will forever be in your power. With some, but not all, but that you can get people to start believing certain things and stop believing others, and to honestly say X, when they would not have before, that I believe one can do. But it is not enough to simply torture and break down, you also have to start adding in stuff, using hypnosis and drugs and rewards and all the unfortunate skills and knowledge we have acquired via cognitive science and well, from messing with people's minds. It's a two part process. And it takes a while. I would give away secrets within an hour, I would guess. Maybe regarding loved ones, I could hold out longer, but I think someone cutting my genitals, and pulling my intestines out and squeezing them or using needles on my eyes would get me to betray anthing fairly fast. That however is not the same as getting me to actually believe new things. That takes another skillset.

God this is aweful.

I'm sorry, it is just not that simple. — Merkwurdichliebe

I don't think it's simple, at all. But none of what you write changes the fact that ideas have been pouring into you for years from others. That you modify, translate, falsely interpret these ideas, reconfigure them, misunderstand them, in addition to taking in reasonably close approximations doesn't change the fact that your mind has been constructed with tremendous input from other minds and this is still going on if you are not isolated from communicating with the others. And the language we get also carries with it all sorts of implicit and explicit ideas and makes it harder to have certain ideas and models of reality. Then all the things that one DOES to achieve various goals, which we learn through imitating others - often forced to use these heuristics - also imply a lot about reality, what other people are and how they are motivated, what 'works' in the world.

It doesn't matter at all if communication is not some perfect transfer of a thought, it does however lead to, in the growing person the creation of all sorts of thoughts in that mind. One of our advantages as an animal is that unlike other animals a huge amount of information can be transferred to us about all sorts of things, and these make us competent navigators, including speakers, in our cultures. There is a downside to this, of course. And side in the full spectrum between the good and bad sides of this.

This is why when we learn languages quite different from our native one, have powerful non-verbal experiences - psychoactive drugs, ritual extremes etc. -, enter and master life in a very different culture, have long term complicated interactions with animals, preferably not ones that are commonly domesticated at least also, we realize all sorts of assumptions we have been making. And we did not choose to make these assumptions. Those assumptions entered us via the culture.

Even what you criticize in your post - the idea that ideas are put in language and perfectly transferred to another person - which is simillar to REddy's critiques of the metaphors around language, see The Conduit Metaphor - is a widespread assumption about language that children learn from the metaphors people use around them. IOW while criticizing a position of mine I don't really have, your argument points out a common cultural assumption that gets passed on to us via communication and is extremely widespread that people do not come up with on their own. They come up with it because it is built into the language. Language made before they were born. And while is changing this language, the dominance of that metaphor keeps being passed on so far.

https://msu.edu/~orourk51/800-Phil/Handouts/Readings/Linguistics/Reddy-TheConduitMetaphor-1979.pdf

You'd be surprised how many GI's died after horrendously creative and drawn out torture sessions implemented by Imperial Japanese. — ISeeIDoIAm

There's nothing I have said that remotely implies or acts as evidence I didn't know this.And, in fact I did know the Japanse treated, for example, POWs horrifically in WW2.

But my intuition tells me that torture has gotten progressively worse throughout time because people have the tendency to resist torture. — ISeeIDoIAm

Of course people resist torture, many for quite a while.

You want to hate many things, to improve things, yet ignore that it is mankind who is doing the destroying and should be hated. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Nope, I don't ignore that.

We default to loving ourselves and each other and unless we change to what you dislike, nothing will change. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

So, what you are saying is 'my idea that we hate ourselves is the only approach that can work.' I don't think that approach will work, even the slightest. Good luck telling people to hate themselves. Let us know what your successes are with that approach here. You can post them in the thread. Along with the science or other evidence it is a worthy approach.

Love more like scriptures tell you to love, which is the way I love.

Proverbs 3:12 For whom the Lord loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth. — Gnostic [quote=

Correceth, is not hateth. And in current English to correct is not to hate and that father no doubt loves his son. And don't tell me how to love as if you know how I love - my son, my self, others. Nothing I have said even remotely implies I do not correceth. As you should know from your own experience.

You do not seem to want to love that much. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

No, what happened is I didn't agree with you and so you just assume a bunch of stuff. You're just another internet narcissist who cannot be criticized and so makes up stuff to justify not learning anything from others. iOW you cannot be correctethed. Which means a part of love you cannot experience.

He died in a very short time. He did not have his personality mind and body ravaged over a long period of time. I could not possibly sit still like he did in that situation. But to protect my children I could probably set myself on fire and not reveal where my children were hiding before I died. Time and torture rip the mind apart. Most of us can sprint. But long distance torture runners, no way. And torturers know this. They throw in waiting and undermine the health of the mind that allows people to be stoic over short periods.

Lots of things can be resolved, perhaps the big questions cannot. But all this is a long way from 'insanity'. Further I think some of the big questions can be resolved for individual thinkers. IOW they can find a position that makes their life work better for them in the context of their values. Beyond that once they choose certain axioms, philosophy can help them draw conclusions and develop positions that work for them. I feel pretty good about what I have arrived at for me in relation to three out of four of those questions you cited. I can't convince everyone else what they should believe, but perhaps that is not possible or necessary. It's not something I feel any pressure from myself to manage. As far as why the something rather than nothing issue, I think the question itself provides a kind of critique of certain assumptions. It seems rather binary to me. We cannot resolve conflicts around big issues so doing philosophy is insane. To me it seems like some humbler goals and a sense of a spectrum of possible use is a healthier attitude about philosophy.

Well, if you had actually read the full post that you quoted from I was talking about cameras and what you quoted referred to cameras in my dialogue with someone else. So read carefully and don't be such an insulting ass. The combination makes you look pathetic.

Yes. I think so. Hard to demonstrate. I think combinations of sleep deprivation, pain, isolation from any social contact, sensory overload and deprivation, physical and sexual abuse over a long period of time would break anyone. A number of torturers have had great success with just position torture alone. Putting people in uncomfortable physical positions. That's nothing compared to depriving people of hope and contact and then not letting the brain recover. Sleep if food to the mind. You starve them. I don't think anyone can avoid being broken.

A man can own another man's body. A man can never own another man's mind. Men decide to give in the will of others because their own is fragile; weak. — ISeeIDoIAm

Wow, that's harsh. Been through torture yourself?

But in all those cases the people being tortured decided to give in. — ISeeIDoIAm

Minds can be broken. You don't decide to break, though there are likely gray areas and some who decide before being broken. So, sure, sometimes people give up and in. But you can destroy a mind and then fill it. Long term probably that person can regain their mind. Solitary, sensory deprivation, then various pain assaults, interfere with sleep. We need thing to remain whole. Minds need things to remain whole. If we starve a body it does not make a decision to give in - at a certain point it simply has not had enough nutrition and stops functioning. Some may give up early, sure. But bodies have needs. And minds need things to stay organized, to have boundaries, to even know what is happening.

Approaches like psychic driving (in the Montreal experiments for example) and other modern torture techniques that combine pain, fear and depriving the mind of what it needs to remain whole are extremely effective. Throw in some hypnosis, drugs and rape and minds fall apart.

If you think you could hold out, I think you're an armchair general. If you think it's a choice then, it seems to me, you think we only have emotional and sensory wants, no needs. I think we have needs to hold a mind together.

I don't think we can get past this impasse. But start a thread if you ever survive with your mind the way you want it after being tortured and mindraped by professionals.

Professionals with freedom. Not like say, the torturers on Guantanamo, who had a lot of freedom compared to, say, law enforcement, but nothing on the level of what is going on outside of any monitoring.

Well, I'm more than willing to hear how that works out. I always assumed that telepathy was fiction, and that the thought that I experience is confined to my mind alone. Furthermore, how is it that my mind can exist within the mind of another, and still continue to remain my mind? — Merkwurdichliebe

Setting aside the issue of telepathy for now, you use language right, when you think. That language has, for example, dead metaphors THROUGHOUT which are ideas from other minds. You have introjected assumptions from parents, teachers, peers, media. Your mind has been influenced by the minds of the books you've read, the movies you've seen and so on. This was pouring into you well before you ever started questioning memes and further even the ways you question and what you question also flowed into you. Cultural biases, and subcultural biases and all the aimed at your unconscious ideas in advertising, films, politics. Sure, you can go off into a cave and avoid all this....now. But you carry with you the thoughts and tools and heurististics of other minds. And this also involves threats within that culture about what not to think and what the ideal is like and so on that will affect how you begin to look at the memes you have. Cognitive dissonence avoidence, denial, confirmation bias in introspection and a host of other factors also trot into that cave also. You are a social mammal with a culture, even when alone.

Thoughts are private, when one thinks, the actual thinking travels no further than the mind doing the thinking. — Merkwurdichliebe

One you start 'thinking for yourself' it's already a fait accompli. Sure, we can unravel stuff, but if you haven't noticed that you parents' thoughts and ideas in media and language based assumptions are still having a powerful set of effect in your mind now, then the great challenge hasn't even begun.

You mind is whatever you identify with 'in there' is immersed and made up of ideas and contructs and metaphors and assumptions made by other people that poured into you - much of it as subtext and subliminal - and to whatever extend to read social media, newspapers, watch films, it is still pouring into you. Even if communication and thoughts were not, somehow, part of a flow of mind, all of that is affecteding your mind and made up its construction as you grew up and also affected whatever tools, goals, abillity to notice you bring to questioning various parts of this.

If you think you are an island, well, you're like those human-made islands in Dubai.

And is it not still the individual who does it all, and to the individual for who it is most valuable, regardless whether that one is reinventing the wheel or merely studying the historic tradition? And who else should it be useful to? — Merkwurdichliebe

useful to? well to that person and potentially others, depending on that individuals goals. But what I meant was that individuals are both separate from and immersed in the minds of others. Immersed!. We don't have pure, separate minds.

I might also add: since it is always the individual that practices philosophy — Merkwurdichliebe

It's a very social field and one is immersed in the other philosophers, as one must be. And there are very strong currents in philosophy. You can't just go off and think. Or you can, but you will likely just reinvent the wheel - since one has absorbed via culture and language all sorts of philosophical assumptions- if one is lucky. One is more likely to reinvent something vastly less useful than the philosophical wheel.

I can agree with this, but the issue is that mistakes will still be made, regardless of how skilled you become. — Pinprick

I agree

I would say even if you had an AI that was capable of applying the rules of logic with 100% efficiency it would still be incapable of solving many philosophical problems — Pinprick

I have no idea what an AI would be like as a philosopher. Symbolic logic can be programmed but applying that to reality - iow semantics, and understanding the world, all the content of useful deduction, for example - is a whole nother ball of wax. It seems to me how the damn this is programmed, 'raised', what sensory systems and information gathering systems it has and the personality that is 'grown' could make for just about anything including a psychopath AI that concludes we are like a mould on bread it wants to eat.

This leads me to think that logic, as well as whatever other philosophical methods, are the wrong tools for the job — Pinprick

Logic without intuition, for example, can do very little. Just shuffle symbols, perhaps play checkers.

Maybe. I think today’s philosophers can rule out several theories in various fields as a result of science, but it seems to me like the big questions in philosophy are still unanswered. — Pinprick

Welll, philosophy in general is very words on a page focused. And the one we tend to know is very middle class academic, bow down to science, Western with a lot of assumptions that fit all that. It's a subculture with a lot of pressure on it. And that pressure distorts and limits it, just as pressures distort and limit other subcultures. In general that is. Individuals may break out of that box.

So that hinges on the individual willingly giving up their agency. In other words: no you can't force your will on others. So success is dependent on the torturee agreeing to give up. — ISeeIDoIAm

Well, that's not what I believe. I think you can force it.

Sorry to sound pompous, that's just the best way I can illustrate my understanding. — ISeeIDoIAm

i don't know what part of that sounds pompous. I didn't understand it however.

The first question I would ask is what does it mean to successfully torture someone/something? — ISeeIDoIAm

IN terms of changing their beliefs, success would be where they are so broken they want to please you and will take in your ideas much as a child will in relation to a parent. I mean, I think such a process is a horrific one. Success only in the sense of achieving a goal, not in any sense that implies I approve.

"Experience" is either a major component or the sole factor in what moulds a individual's world view. — ISeeIDoIAm

Yes, i think so. I mean, we have temperments, we are not blank slates, so our temperments and eariler experiences and desires and proclivities will affect how we are affected by experience. But when we talk about fundamental changes I think new types of experiences are a must.

But my thought is what of the influences on a person? To what degree is change created internally vs externally? — ISeeIDoIAm

I think you can head yourself in a direction. You can choose to explore. You can choose experiences that will change you and even perhaps in a specific direction. One can challenge one's own beliefs. In a sense risk them. One can try to get rid of beliefs that plague you - cognitive behavioral therapy can be quite successful with this, for example. You can't simply decide to belief X, but you can move yourself in that direction and see if you can, through a variety of experiences come to that belief.

And then stuff just happens, and this can change your mind.

We are our systems. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

We are the enemy of the environment and should hate what we do to it. I do not separate what we do from what we are, so hate whatever you like of those two options. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I guess that my gut reaction is that self-hate will nto improve things and I see self-hate as causal in the way we damage the environment. Our disenchantment and disconnection from nature is a form of self-hatred since we are a part of nature. It is a part of disregarding ourselves. Just as shitting on our mother would be a form of self-hatred. I get what you mean, and I can sort of accept it as provocation, but as a real suggestion I think it just muddles the issue. People hating themselves will have even less contact with themselves, wan
t more distraction and use more energy and create more garbage,since they have no idea how to live.

Yes, as we are allowing our default position of love to rule us when I think we should let our hate for what we hate rule us and move us to do the right thing for the future generations, if it is not already too late to mitigate that harm. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I was pointing out that the argument you used was appealing to our self-love and encouraging us to treat ourselves well by not destroying the environment. In the context of saying we need to hate ourselves, it is precisely the opposite approach you then take.

Are we not a part of the systems we should hate? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Yes and no, and to varying degrees person to person. If you said something like we should hate our disconnection with nature or hate what we do in relation to nature when we X, that's one thing. But you start with a general, we should start to hate ourselves. I can tell you that I know that hating myself more will not help the planet in the slightest. Their may be people who in a core way hate their mother planet and they need to hate some of their current practices and values. Fine. But that we all need to hate ourselves more which would mean love ourselves less is NOT something I think would be remotely good for anyone or anything in my case. In fact if I and my wife hated ourselves more tomorrow, I think it would only serve the ones who really hate life and nature. For much the same reason I dislike the way various religions teach self-hate (while denying it) I dislike this encouragement to self-hate, however much I appreciate the goal of getting us to where we will treat nature better. It's nothing for me. And it just creates even more problems for us to unravel. It is as if those who hate and destroy nature and want to hang on to those practices and do not, like me, grieve what is happening, are showing self-love in their relationship with the planet. They are not. They may think so, but they are wrong. They might as well be hitting themselves in the face with a hammer. I see little self love in them. They don't even know themselves.

We are our systems. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Which are filled with self-hate. And the members of that we are all kinds of different things. If you think hating yourself more will help the planet, well, do that. Hate yourself more. I am skeptical that will clean up one plastic bag in the ocean, or create legislation that is much more careful with nano-tech pollution. But I don't know what you will do if you start hating yourself (more).

I do know however that my hating myself will not protect a single leaf.

People have used undoctered photos to show ghosts, auras, bigfoot, ufos and more. One can say that these are not good evidence or one can say that some are good evidence. My point was that the camera does not immediately dispel miracles. Due to how light affects the medium all sorts of things can be shown or 'shown'. Cameras are not objective and all sorts of things can be or seem to be captured in photographic images. This would also include photos that seem to prove things in legal situations, when in fact even undoctored photos can be misleading. It's a kind of mechanical eye, which is fallible and distorting and, as I mentioned, has stages of translation where distortions and 'interpretations' of reality appear. And unlike vision it presents a whole field at once, whereas vision, while seeming to do this, is actually darting around, relooking at images. This also distorts but it has advantages (and disadvantages). Whatever your belief system, cameras can both support and then also provide counterevidence. They are not perfect reflectors of reality.

I think they can, but generally if they do it, then they wanted to, to some degree, and went looking for experiences and arguments that undermined their previous beliefs.

And people's deep beliefs can also be changed by experiences that one did not choose but just came along and had the impact.

Racism can change in both the former and latter ways, for example. If one has not been around a specific race and one has a lot of judgments, experience that goes against those ideas can change the belief. Someone uncomfortable with their own racism could choose to go out and find counterexamples and undermine their own beliefs.

With the necessary time and methods can a man change the belief of another man, no matter how powerful that belief is, or are there certain beliefs that are rooted so strongly that they simply become irreversible and they cannot be changed not even in an eternity? — Eugen

I think it is rare that someone can decide to have as a goal to change someone's mind and then do it - regarding deep set beliefs. Unless one can torture them or control their lives and even then it will take a while and may not last.

But people can certainly change their beliefs and other people can be a part of that. Experience, however is key.

If the person has experiences that challenge their beliefs, then change is quite possible.

In online forums there is 'in the air' this idea that one can and should be able to convince people via argument. I think this can happen, though around deep beliefs, very rarely and over very long periods of time and probably other factors would be key in the change.

We learn by experience, much of it as children and much of it is set in deeply there, though even those can change. But usually we
need
new
experiences.

See, I have no faith in the power of argument, so I repeat myself.

People need to experience things to change, and generally not just the thoughts of other people. They need to live through something that changes them.

Occam's Razor sucks like a black hole...and is probably misapplied more than any other philosophical "principle." — Frank Apisa

I agree with this. It is misused and misunderstood.
However...

If one looks for simple explanations one will eventually find one that fits well enough to be considered adequate. — Frank Apisa

the idea is not to look for simple explanations. It is that if one is given a choice between two explanations, each of which fit the evidence equally well, it is better to go with the explantion that has less posited entities. That's useful for communal knowledge.

People often interpret this to mean that the simpler explanation is more likely to be true. Which is not the case at all, as any neuroscientist or particle physicist will happily tell you. But that is an incorrect interpretation.

And with Pascal's Wager people often assume he intended this as an arguement to start believing in God. This was not the case.

There are a few different spiritual disciplines that count on cameras to record miraculous things without using any tricks. It's a myth that a camera is somehow an objective eye. Auras, ghosts, energy fields, ufos, ectoplasma, mysterious creatures and much more have been recorded or seemingly recorded by people who have not manipulated the images. How? Well, that depends on one's paradigm to some degree. But this is because cameras, like eyes, will distort and interpret reality. Blend things, creat objects out of shadows and halos of light and so on. Of course, perhaps they have actually caught real things that we have not yet confirmed via science. But the point is that cameras, much like any sense organ, especially when one adds in the development of the film (iow there are several stages of 'perception' and 'translation') are not merely objective. They are not perfect witnesses.

Of course dishonest people can further add manipulation to this at every stage of photographic development. But even without any dishonesty all sorts of miraculous things can be confirmed or 'confirmed'.

If we do not turn our love of self to our hate of self, we are bound for our near extinction. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

What do you mean by 'hate of self' here. Are you actually suggesting we learn to hate ourselves? Isn't our denial of our connection to nature already a form of self-hatred?

Science is also showing us that we are in a major extinction event that may well include a vast number of people. I doubt that our full extinction will come to pass, but we will be reduced to such small numbers that we will likely revert to a less sophisticated system and city states. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Here you are appealing to our self-love. Many of us will die, our lives with be less good, those that survive.

I think, given the incompetence of all governments and gods; we should let our great love for what leads us and turn it to hate, as we should, to insure the survival of people right here and right now. Start to hate the systems that got us all to this pitiful place in time. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Hating the systems is not the same as hating the self, or?

That makes sense, but I’m not sure that there is a good way to tell if your skills are improving or not. I guess making fewer mistakes could be a marker for improvement, but does making fewer mistakes get you closer to the truth? — Pinprick

You would be fooled less, in the context of a philosophical discussion. Being fooled less - by your own poor arguments, by the poor arguments of others, by noticing fallacies, by noticing where semantic assumptions are taking place (as a few examples) - you would be less likely to be convinced of things that are false. That is closer to the truth or less far from the truth, at the very least.

My way of thinking is that if you look at the 2,000 plus years humans have been using philosophical methods you realize that our methods inevitably lead to flawed results. It’s like we are continually trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. We desperately need a different peg, but none can be found, so we just continue shoving. — Pinprick

Well, for me this bird's eye view is a very hard one to demonstrate or counter. However from my in situ view, my own practice doing philosophy had led to my noticing when arguments are sound or not to a much greater degree. This keeps me from being misled. Which keeps me from being led into falsehood.

And i would guess, though now we are into guessing, that philosophers today would have much more correct ideas about what is the case, than philosophers from long ago. Of course they are aided in this from other fields, but it also includes their own long work through the generations.

Well, I agree that it shouldn't be called the Chinese virus. Here's a WHO statement put out in 2015 with their justification for avoiding such things.

https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-new-diseases/en/

On the other hand we get these waves of demonizing nations, in media, by politicians, and then spreading through social media, compared to which calling it The Chinese Virus seems rather tame.

I guess I hope that everyone who is carefully monitoring the use of nations in disease names also carefully monitors where all the newsmedia demonizing aimed at a particular nation is coming from and why they become fads, and how wars often follow this.

So, like, cool, but jeez, I hope this care carries over into the really effective propaganda also.

insanity. — wiyte

God it, yeah.

Isn't that stupidity? Not insanity. — wiyte

Do mean you the guy I was responding to should have written 'stupidity' instead of 'insanity'? For whatever it's worth, I've seen both versions a few times. Either way, there are plenty of good reasons to repeat actions even if the first results of these actions are under par.

Beating a man to death for wearing a rival football team's attire is a better descript. — wiyte

Of?

A common, although perhaps inaccurate, definition of insanity is repeating the same actions, but expecting different results — Pinprick

Of course repeating the same actions in order to, over time, get different results could be a definition of 'to practice'. And practicing leads to all sorts of skills.

Nothing that can't be detected or measured i.e. perceived is real in science. — TheMadFool

Well, let's notice right off that you moved the bar from perceived to detected and measure, which are not at all the same. But even this is not true.

Natural law, if meant here as the laws of nature, can be observed. — TheMadFool

What do they look like? What are they made of? Are they physical? Made of atoms, quarks? They can be deduced, sort of.

or the patterns that perhaps 'come from them' can be observed, but that's not the laws themselves. And also, it may not be true that there are laws. There is growing evidence that 'laws' are local and time-local. IOW it is a useful heuristic. But in any case the laws themselves are certainly not observed.

It is possible for anyone to become an expert. — TheMadFool

That's very hard to prove and further, are you willing to put in the time to become an expert in things you have decided are not real? And certainly some people both from experience and innate talent have a much easier time. And then last, again, my point was just how common it is that when one person can perceive something this is due to expertise/experience rather than your generalization that this is usually hallucinations, etc.

As I said, anyone can be an expert. — TheMadFool

Again easy to say and further it does not refute what I wrote. Furhter there are tempermental and paradigmatic reasons certain people never try to be experts in many areas. Then they assume things, like you do, about those who are experts or may be. And then they talk as if they know that those experts are not basing their beliefs on empirical stuff.

I am sure you think you responded to me but I really don't think you did. You conceded nothing. Nor did you respond to the idea of being agnostic. It is not as if - which was implicit in your questions - one must either accept or reject as unreal what others posit. There is always a third option immediately and long term one could, in fact, try to be an expert oneself.

Insisting is what one does to others. I insist to you that my belief or faith is correct. But that is not inherent in faith. One can have quietly and asocially faith in something.

Here's a range of types of references to retrocausality. Note: I am not presenting these as proof, but the door is certainly not closed on it and there are indications it might be possible. Certainly qm presents a different picture than classical physics would. How this will be resolved, I do not know.
https://futurism.com/physicists-may-have-discovered-one-of-the-missing-pieces-of-quantum-theory
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-physicists-retrocausal-quantum-theory-future.html
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-retrocausality/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocausality#Quantum_physics
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.09688.pdf

And as an on-topic aside, the possibility of retrocausality is an issue I would put in metaphysics and since it is discussed and experimented around in physics, it seems to me that science does weigh in on metaphysical issues. Physics deals, for example, with ontology. It tries to get answers to fundamental issues that do fall under metaphysics' baliwick.

Firstly, as this "someone near him" reveals, there must be someone to whom color is perceivable. — TheMadFool

Sure, and then the issue becomes are there some people who can perceive things others cannot that are nevertheless real.

Secondly, the fact that you say "seen by some but not others" implies what I've been saying all along - that whatever is deemed to exist must register on the senses of someone. The very requirement that "some" perceive indicates the essence of being real is to be perceived. — TheMadFool

But in science things are often posited that are not perceived. We see effects on new causes that effect something else and this makes a meter move. Sometimes things are accepted as real that do not even do this, but are deduced. Like the idea of a natural law.

The usual contexts in which such kinds of privileged perception, only some perceiving, appears are in deception and insanity. — TheMadFool

I disagree. I would say the usual contexts are where there is expertise: poker professionals, art authenticators, dermatologists, botanists, carpenters, detectives, psychologists will all perceive things where non-experts will not. This is a regular part of a vast range of fields, but is also happening in all sorts of leisure and private settings and activities.

How will we know we're not being deceived? — TheMadFool

We can always remain agnostic. Sometimes merely trivially and formally, in other cases with more serious agnosticism. There is no need to make an immediate binary choice.

After all the only means we have, that what is real, and not a deception, must necessarily be perceived by all, is now useless. — TheMadFool

That is a fairly useless heuristic and we depend on the special perception of experts regularly and certain in crisis. And these can be mundane experts like spouses, friends, parents, not to speak of professional experts. We are constantly engaging others who are better at perceiving some things.

The idea of the physical is intimately tied to the senses. What is physical is exactly that which can be sensed; the converse, however, is false for the reason that hallucinations occur. — TheMadFool

But a lot of what is considered 'physical' in science cannot be sensed.

Naturalism, to me, is the philosophy that claims that all there is is the physical; in other words, what is real has to be sensible in some way or other. — TheMadFool

Ibid, but further the word 'physical' no longer has any substance related meaning. IOW it looks like a claim about substance, but it now simply means real. Regardless of the qualities or lack of qualities of something if science decides something is real, it will fall under naturalism and be taken as physical, even if it shares nothing in common with chairs and rocks.

There is good reason to assume such a position because to admit the non-physical as part of reality is like a blind man admitting colors into his world; even if there are colors, the blind man will never perceive them and it will fail to make a difference to his world. — TheMadFool

But colors do make a difference in a blind person's world. A blind person could ask someone near him what color the light is and know (to the degree he trusts the sighted person) whether it is time to cross the street or not. Perhaps all sorts of things that are supposedly 'non-physical' are simply seen by some but not others.

If both the perceptible and the imperceptible are real then what is not real? — TheMadFool

First, many so called supernatural phenomena are perceived. Perhaps misinterpreted, perhaps hallucinated, but there is a very large empirical facet to religion and 'supernatural experiences.' This does not prove that the religious and those who believe in the supernatural (a truly badly labeled category) are correct, but it is as if there is no empirical facet to these things when there is. And we know that things have been said to be impossible, when sensed by a minority which have turned out to be real.

Often in discussions like this it is as if all religion and all 'supernatural' experiences have no empirical element. but this is simply not the case. Now we can move into, from this, to the discussion of whether the interpretations of the experiences are correct, but I find it very odd that the issues is framed as if there is no empirical facet to these things.

I don't know what quantum mechanics has to do with final causes. I don't know of any studies about the purposes of elementary particles. — David Mo

There seems to be retrocausation in qm. Not that there's much consensus about this. This is not the same as final cause, since this latter implies purpose, but it is almost as if the past must now conform to the future.

By the way, what are the minimum necessary concepts to derive the concept of colors? — Zelebg

If the universe is empty, presumably there is no light. There is absolutely no way someone would come up with the concept of colors without ever experiencing light.

Logic is just grammar; ways of putting symbols together. Nothing to symbolise means no symbols. — Banno

:up:

Logic without information is just some rules. Like the rules to checkers without, even a checkboard.