The Republican Party is utterly culpable in this matter. — Wayfarer

The old republicans need to realize that there's no republican party anymore. It's just MAGA and Trump loyalists. The sooner they realize this, the sooner they could organize into a new republican party. Maybe even brand it as such, "new republicans" to win on sounding "edgy new".

Key point is that people need to realize that republicans are gone. The ones in power in that party are these MAGA fanatics and Trump loyalists.

Everyone needs to wake the fuck up to this.

It has been pointed out, that while Associated Press and Reuters have now been banned from White House briefings, that the official Russian state media had a reported in the Oval Office today, to conveniently broadcast Trump and Vances brow-beating of Zelenskyy to the whole Russian federation. How convenient for them. — Wayfarer

If it turns out that Trump is collaborating with Putin... remind me again, how does the west treat Russian spies who infiltrate positions of power?

Could you explain how it is? The US has a giant nuclear arsenal with the ability to deploy them with ICBMs, medium range missiles, submarines, and Air Force bombers. Why does the US need NATO? I'm asking. — frank

You think warfare is only military means and explosions? People listed all those things as well for Russia and then it turned out the military strength wasn't enough. Then we can also look at how a single Swedish submarine sunk one of the USs largest cruisers during a Baltic exercise.

And looking at the innovation rate of China, what would happen if China went to full scale war with the US after leaving NATO?

NATO is not just a numbers game for military spending and hardware, it's an alliance of collaboration, of spreading out into the world as an extended shield. Imagine a US crippled by internal politics, not in NATO, cut off from intelligence collaborations.

And also add all other things I said, that the consequences of being in NATO is also affecting collaboration outside of NATO as the collaborative security also means higher safety trading and collaborating between NATO members in other areas.

If this was a RTS (strategy game), you're the type of player who would just produce as many soldiers and vehicles as possible and then be surprised by someone utilizing their resources better to hit your weak spots rather than just using brute force. Like the single submarine taking out the cruiser because it was technologically superior going against hubris.

It's a perverse way to go: to say to fight corruption, one enables rampant corruption. To say one is improving the lives of the ordinary people, one makes everything even worse with few insiders going from corruption to outright looting and kleptocracy. To say one is for freedom of speech, one implements the most outrageous word-policing that is fitting to an authoritarian state.

Yet Trump supporters are totally fine with this, because they have blocked away any criticism towards their leader. This is the way that conspiracy theorists work: they think that everything has been this huge conspriracy, and what they want is to have the conspiracy of their own as they don't believe that the antidote to conspiracies would be openness and stronger democratic institutions. People are sheeple, so it is necessary to use propaganda. Now the correct propaganda of the anti-deep state people. Conspiracy theorists are the enemy of a democracy, because they don't believe for starters that a democracy could or would be possible. — ssu

I'd wish the conspiracy theorists all unite under their own flag, make a unity of bullshit and fascism so it's easier to categorize them as extremists and fight them. Right now, they're so scattered and so undefined that it's impossible to fight against it while they're also too stupid and disorganized to ever do any serious harm. They simply act as a big iron chain to society, holding back good progress, holding back improvements and holding back fighting climate change.

They're a sickness that holds society in bed, making everyone apathetic and without energy. Honestly, I hate them all and despise their disgusting stupidity. The negative consequences to society over time is larger than people seem realize.

I see what you're saying, but the US put trillions into NATO because it was defending itself by containing communism. The US isn't defending itself through NATO now. It's just exercising global influence. I think most Americans would question the wisdom of continuing to take that role. What's in it for us? — frank

The US has at the moment the historically delusional idea of isolationism. The collaborations through NATO is not contained within the operation of NATO. It's like installing tax incentives on something which boosts an influx of tourists, the tax incentive is essentially a loss of tax income, but it boosts the economy anyway through the resulting tourism.

What I mean is that economy doesn't work like you're hinting at. Trillions into NATO over its entire lifetime is nothing compared to the unquantified income of how other transactions have been between the nations within this alliance.

Such an alliance becomes a security to do further business between nations as it is as much a prevention of war against NATO members as it is between NATO members. Effectively it becomes a somewhat better deterrence than both threats or the UN.

Society isn't a company in which everything is a basic balance sheet. It's operating on so many hidden parameters that anyone just looking at costs fail to see the benefits and future gains. It's not something that can be looked at in quarter-term results.

And how do you know that the US isn't defended through NATO? The very point of NATO is deterrence, it's not just defense whenever there's an actual war. What if leaving NATO actually opens up the US to threats far greater than things have been if they would have stayed in NATO? That the fact that a military strength like Russia didn't go that well in Ukraine shows that there's a lot of hubris in the idea of just military might. Comparably, look at all the American hubris throughout history, Vietnam war, Gulf war etc.

On top of that, NATO isn't just military collaboration, it's intelligence. The members share intelligence information that isn't visible as pure military. And the US also has a lot of defensive bases that are part of defense lines for the US as a first line of defense further away from the US borders; these are NATO collaborations. So without NATO, intelligence information might be cut off and these defensive lines disappear.

I don't think most Americans understand anything about NATO. And showing by how the US citizens voted, I don't think most of them have even basic understandings of foreign politics or how the world actually works in trade and collaborations.

But if NATO disappears, then there will just be a new alliance among the other nations. It's too effective as deterrence and security to just be removed, regardless of the US involvement or not.

But the US shouldn't be as naive as to think they're untouchable if they leave NATO. It's more than just a numbers game.

I see that evaluation - whatever you mean that in regard to human behaviour - is very important to you. I don't quite understand why. — Vera Mont

I'm not sure what you mean? I'm following in the direction you're taking the discussion by choosing to answer on certain parts of what I wrote.

In order to 'evaluate' anything, you first need a standard against which to measure it and some unit of measurement. — Vera Mont

But morality is fluid, changing between cultures and through time. How can you have a standard with such a fluid foundation?

And why is it fluid? Because we evaluate and dissect our morality in every generation. And that is impossible without the ability to empathically understand other people's point of view.

How such standards and norms are defined is according to the precepts and world-view of the culture: what a society expects, accepts and tolerates from its members. Moral and legal systems differ, as do human attitudes from one historical period to another. That is why I find your demand to evaluate behaviours and their motives so perplexing. — Vera Mont

Culture, world-views and society change massively over time. It isn't static.

How can you find a stable moral ground while society is changing without careful evaluation and dissection of the moral values that are changing?

What is perplexing is that you point out that morality is different between cultures and through time, but then state that it is at the same time a standard world-view that should define the norms. How can you both have a constantly changing morality and at the same time letting it be a standard norm? It becomes a paradox in which society should always adhere to the societal standards and norms of morality, but at the same time these norms and standards are constantly changing.

Isn't it then true that since morality constantly change and this morality is informing the societal norms and standards, that in order for it to change in a rational and thoughtful way, people need to carefully evaluate societal morals in order for them to change over time in a thoughtful and responsible way?

That cannot be done without fully understanding the emotional realm of morality, which requires an empathic understanding of all people.

We don't. Every society sets up a system of laws to regulate its members' behaviour, and every society fails to prevent crime, interpersonal conflict, injustice and abuse. — Vera Mont

It fails because it still operates on mob mentality. A problem with democracies has been that crime and punishment becomes voting issues, and so we have outsourced an academically sound topic to that of the mob screaming for solutions and politicians promising solutions that are satisfying for the crowd/mob, not those that are effective in preventing crime.

Laws are only able to guide those already law-abiding, and only able to invoke justice after a crime, not prevent them. As plenty academic studies have shown, laws mean nothing to those who do crimes, because that's not how the human psyche and emotions work.

Crime prevention requires understanding the situations and emotions which leads up to crime, and adjusting society to prevent those paths taken. But this is not emotionally satisfying for the mob/crowd, who operates on the bloodlust of revenge, which in turn informs political decisions that supposedly are there to deal with crime.

The mob and public is not intellectually and emotionally mature enough to stand behind actual solutions. This has been proven over and over. There are so many researchers who comment on bad political decisions for crime prevention over and over that it's become satire. The public is immature in this area.

Inside and outside are hardly abstract concepts. (and I didn't say appearances inform our moralities; that's far more complicated than everyday assessment of another person's actions). We see what other people look like, what they do, hear what they say and judge them accordingly. We can imagine how they feel if it's similar to how we might feel in their place.
In general, human do not treat one another as if all that understanding and bridge-making were very effective. — Vera Mont

It is abstract because you refer to it as some standard within a system that is constantly changing. What is a standard and norm within something that is constantly changing? A person within this system might adhere to the norms and standards around them, but a citizen in Nazi Germany did so too. It's not enough to just conclude morality to come from this illusive "standard" because that standard is constantly shifting. In order to find good morals when living in Nazi Germany, only those with functioning empathy were able to see through the indoctrination narrative that skewed the morality of the public. As I mentioned, the public is generally stupid and emotionally immature; that's true for both Nazi Germany and modern times.

Only through empathic understanding can we truly evaluate and arrive at good moral standards that consist through time rather than change by doctrines.

I thought NATO had to do with opposing communism. Communism is gone. — frank

Society and world orders evolve, what was once one thing evolves into something else. Most things in society started out as one thing and evolved into something else. Police forces were a pretty new thing as we see them today, so why don't police forces still act on orders by the head of state, acting from their orders? Because it evolved.

Alliances evolves too, what NATO was is not what NATO is today. Today it's an alliance to protect against mostly corrupt states from making hostile actions. And I would say it functions as its intended. Russia is not very keen on invading the Baltics for instance, even though those nations are pretty easy to conquer, much more easy than Ukraine.

Mostly, it's people who aren't even living in proximity to hostile states who complain about NATO. It's another reality for those who live close to and having their borders constantly violated by a hostile nation.

But as I've discussed earlier, I think a new alliance needs to be formed. That is defined by democratic stability and low corruption. In which it's not just an alliance in military power, but for all things like free trade and travel. It would more easily brand itself as an alliance of the "good".

Because people argue over the origin of NATO constantly in some belief that such a thing even matters today. It doesn't. And arguing about it is as useless as arguing over who has the right to a land based on hundreds of year old decisions.

The modern world, after the wall fell, internationally evolved into better agreement about how borders were drawn. It's become part of how the world argues for peace. And through trade agreements and travel, most nations have settled into a better society without invading each other. But there still are rotten eggs trying to behave like the old times and NATO went from an alliance of the cold war to an alliance to protect this new world order, against those nations which tries to play the old games.

Imagine that we dismantled NATO tomorrow, it's gone. There's no more NATO... *POOF*
And then the day after tomorrow, the nations of the world gathered around and discussed forming a new alliance to help protect each other, leading to a new military alliance, under a new name, say "Alliance of Military Protection Internationale", AMPI for short. Most of the old NATO members, who already have a good military collaboration, sign up for it, forming basically the same composition of nations as NATO, only, it's not called AMPI and is not formed based on the old reasons, but primarily out of the modern condition and nation's need for an alliance of protection.

What has effectively changed in that scenario? Other than basically changing the name?

Evaluation is intellectual — Vera Mont

Empathy is used to understand information. Evaluation can only be done out of information. You can't evaluate without anything to evaluate and draw conclusions from and you can't evaluate if you don't understand the information.

What's the standard against which you evaluate another person's behaviour? Your own, or the norm accepted by society. — Vera Mont

How do you arrive at moral behavior? For yourself and society? You keep returning to some "standard" or "norm", but how are these defined? How do you evaluate these if you aren't open to understanding behavior fully through empathic understanding?

Emotions may cause him to act a certain way, but he's not evaluated by society on his feelings, only on his actions. Behaviour, is judged on legal considerations of prevention, correction or punishment. No empathy required. — Vera Mont

This is plain wrong. Courts evaluate the reasons for a crime all the time. The lust-filled smiling murderer get life in prison and the person struck with passionate revenge get a lower sentence. An action is always evaluated out of what caused the actions.

But empathy is not about justice, it's about understanding any action and behavior. Through empathy we can understand others in society doing good or bad, it's how we function socially, it's why the mirror-neurons are an important part; they're key to humans even being social animals.

And if we speak of crime preventions, how do you think we can prevent crimes without empathically understand the drive behind certain crimes? It's only through proper empathy that we can understand why certain crimes happen and be able to prevent it in the future.

Not to evaluate. Only to understand and figure out how to deal with the destructive ones. — Vera Mont

And how do we figure out how to deal with destructive ones without fully understanding their emotions?

That judgment is made from the outside: What did the person do? Does our collective moral framework condone that act? (Morality is not a given; it varies by culture, circumstance and time.) Should we allow him to keep doing it? If not, how do we stop him? (More often by incarceration than fellow feeling.) — Vera Mont

And how does this collective and individual moral framework form in the first place? Through time and culture, how do you think morality evolves? How does it change?

You're referring to this abstract "outside" which informs our morality, but what is this "outside" but the thing we formed by our empathic understanding of the human condition? Of each other and everyone's struggles? If we didn't use empathy to discern morality, then we would chop off the hands of the thief who stole some bread, regardless of that act being to save their child from dying of hunger. We don't do that, because we mold morality out of our empathic understanding of other's acts.

Who says it needs to be quantifiable? Humans do torture one another as well as other animals and not necessarily for their own pleasure: sometimes it's just business. — Vera Mont

I talked about how to evaluate the complexity of human thoughts and acts, which aren't able to easily be evaluated through mere data collection about the physical chemistry of the being.

I do not believe that every executioner feels the fear of his charges, that every pain researcher shares the distress of his lab specimens, that the members of a lynch-mob identify with their victims. Conversely, I don't believe that it is necessary for a surgeon to experience the suffering of his patients or a psychotherapist to identify with the glee of a serial killer. — Vera Mont

Empathy isn't a one-note thing. It's not either on or off. As I mentioned, people who are unable to handle empathy can end up in a cognitive dissonance. Some train themselves to utilize empathy for research, others to evaluate complex societal issues.

An executioner doesn't have to understand the person they execute. A lab researcher doesn't have to understand their subject if that's not vital to the study, a lynch-mob wouldn't exist without their failure to empathize. A surgeon might not need empathy when doing surgery, but sure does so when evaluating their well-being afterwards and before. And a psychotherapist absolutely require empathy to be able to understand their subjects, how would they otherwise discern the emotional dimension of their subject and form a proper explanation for their behavior and actions?

What you're describing isn't what empathy is about. Empathy is an ability to help understand another person through a deep emotional understanding of their feelings. It has nothing to do with sympathizing with other people's morality, their actions or anything like that. And that's my point; people constantly mix things up believing that if someone through empathy, show understanding of an immoral person, then they also agree with them.

It's this that prevents society to fully function and fully deal with morality's complexity, because people judge each others ability to evaluate morality based on a misconceived idea about how we form understanding about individual's actions. And this concept of some overarching morality that is guided by society, leaders, god or whatever, is what existentialists throughout the 1900s tackled because how society, especially Nazi Germany in the 30s and 40s proved that such faith in institutional morality is plain bullshit and corruptible to the point an entire society becomes immoral.

This is why empathy needs to stop be seen as sympathizing. Our mirror-neurons, which are the most important part of empathy, does not have any part in how we judge other people. This function works regardless of morality, but being aware of our empathy helps tremendously to form judgements and morality that is just and fair; and much better than faith in institution's corruptible definitions of morality.

By having studied similar cases and followed similar behaviours back through their history. Like understanding the malfunction of a car engine without feeling like a car engine. — Vera Mont

That comparison is not valid as not having an insight into the experience of emotion means you cannot evaluate the emotions that led to a certain behavior.

It's Mary in the black and white room, or the chinese room; you cannot fully rationalize human morality without understanding the experience. And how do you know that all the definitions in academic psychology doesn't derive from also having an empathic component?

You're basically asking humans that do scientific research on humans to evaluate emotional driving forces behind behavior, without an understanding of what those emotions really are.

It is impossible to study human behavior, without our mirror-neurons firing off empathic reactions. We can study an animal and conclude their pain-centra to fire when we do something to it, but to study complex moral actions by examining the reasoning and emotional complexity that caused it is not quantifiable in the same way.

The normal kind, yes. — Vera Mont

That's just arbitrary. What is "normal"? In relation to what? You're not talking about empathic reactions and mirror-neurons, you're talking about values in morality. You are moralizing the action in order to argue for there not to be an empathic reaction.

This is the kind of fear I'm talking about. A fear people feel of in some way get "infected" by what they argue is immoral if they were to empathize with someone acting immorally and why people mix up sympathy with empathy.

It's so mixed up that when trying to research the clear definitions of the two even the sources of information are unclear and rather treat them as blurring the definitions between them. And I think that's a mistake. Primarily by society being influenced by people fearing to investigate immoral behavior. It's why the FBI agents who inspired the series "Mindhunter" got so much criticism and lack of understanding when they formed the research material for how to profile serial killers. They did their research in large part through empathic understanding of these serial killers they researched. The research they had before that simply concluded "crazy", which had zero substance to qualify as enough explanation to act as profiling material.

some degree of compassion is possible — Vera Mont

Compassion is not needed for empathy.

Morality is irrelevant; emotions are not ruled by moral precepts. — Vera Mont

Exactly. Empathy is not about morality, it's about mirror-neurons, about the ability to understand feelings in others. To understand feelings, to understand an emotion of sexual desire in another person, is not the same as morally agreeing with why they feel that sexual desire.

I disagree. People study and understand all kinds of things from virology to cosmology without any sort of identification with the objects they are observing. — Vera Mont

How do you discern an immoral act without examining the emotions that informed that act? And how do you examine emotions without understanding what those emotions are? Researching cosmology is not the same as researching our psychology.

And even if you attempt to, through neuroscientific studies, most can just conclude that a sexual predator has the same neurological pattern as someone in a normal sexual encounter. Are we to conclude then that the moral act of the sexual predator is as moral as a normal sexual act because the neurological data is showing similar results? Or is our research into the morality of this person's act in need of a more subjective realm utilizing the experience of what it means to be human, i.e using the mirror-neurons to fully grasp the causal effect of the predators act?

While empathy isn't about morality, it's both needed to fully examine moral acts, and impossible to rid yourself of when examining any humans. You cannot exclude your mirror-neurons from your experience, and if you examine morality and other humans, you will always be a slave to those mirror-neurons.

And I think that's key to understand why people become so emotionally panicked when being asked to examine some immoral person. Because their mirror-neurons functions automatically and when they become conscious of their empathic reactions towards a criminal they morally despise, it creates a heavy cognitive dissonance that they, without training, doesn't know how to handle.

Researchers, like those FBI agents who researched serial killers in the 70s, essentially train themselves to use their empathy to examine immoral people. They train away the dissonance, understand how to handle their emotions during research to understand what they are researching.

This is far to vast a blanket! There are crimes of so many different kinds, committed by so many different people for so many different reasons, nobody on earth can empathize with all of the perpetrators. — Vera Mont

Yes they can. The emotions behind crimes are based on the same emotions anyone feels. You're still talking about sympathizing. You are thinking about evaluating each crime under their moral dimension, evaluating if they are moral or not. As I've said, evaluating the morality of these crimes is not empathy; empathy is used to evaluate the moral dimension.

You can have two crimes of people killing someone and robbing them, but one has been working in slave-like conditions under the person they rob, fearing that this person will strike back at them so they kill him and take his money to be free and be able to afford living - while the other is excited around killing and did so regardless of getting the money without killing. How do you evaluate the differences in morality between these two if you aren't able to empathically understand the differences between the two people's emotions that informed their actions? The fear and desperation in the first, and the joy and excitement in violence of the second?

This is what I'm talking about. Empathy and sympathy should be regarded as two different things. Empathy is fundamentally our ability to feel the emotions of another, it's the mirror-neurons firing; it has nothing to do with the morality of that person, or our own feelings judging that person. I can absolutely despise a criminal, hate him and hope he rots, while still empathically understand the emotions he felt that drove him to his immoral act. Holding those two paths in my mind at the same time helps inform my moral judgement of the man, and it's the difference between me being part of a raging mob and being a supporter of a functioning justice system.

I'm not sure about that distinction. One can understand things from a purely academic or clinical position, that requires no empathy. Once you recognize yourself in the other, you share their emotional state, 'feel' their pain, fear, hunger, anger; they are reacting as you would react in a similar situation. — Vera Mont

That doesn't really change my take on it. The ability to feel as another does not mean to agree with their actions out of those emotions. That's the difference. And we can understand academically and clinically, but I'd argue we do wo better with a high empathic ability. How do you academically evaluate a murderers psychological state of mind without the empathic ability to recognize that psychological state of mind?

I doubt you can empathize with all murderers. The one who does it for sexual pleasure? — Vera Mont

Can you not emphasize with sexual attraction, pleasure etc.? The emotions involved has nothing to do with the context. You either sympathize with the actions and decisions out of those emotions or you don't. Empathically understand a sexual predator is absolutely possible, but sympathizing with them is immoral.

Without the ability to empathically understand, we are unable to discern and investigate motive of an immoral act. And I'd say this is a key area to which society often fails when trying to fight crime, the inability, or the rejection of empathic thinking around a crime leads to societal actions that goes against what researchers tell society is the effective path towards reducing said crimes. Most of how society operates on, is on reactions of sympathy values; "do I sympathize with these actions or not", which in turn leads to blanket solutions like stronger punishments rather than looking at the mechanics that formed an individual into a composition of emotions leading to the crimes in the first place.

It's this mix up between sympathy and empathy which makes people blame those who empathically understands some monster in society. Like when Lars von Trier said that he "understands Hitler" at the Cannes film festival and then became a person non grata because of it. That's a display of people not understanding the difference between empathically understanding Hitler and sympathetically agreeing with him.

knew a woman who claimed to be an empath, highly sensitive to the emotions of others. She was actually borderline, but that's a whole other story. To the extent there are those whose empathy levels are off the charts, I agree that it can be limiting. There are instances where hard decisions have to be made. People have to get fired, be imprisoned, and sometimes wars must be waged. It's not that these tasks must be reserved for the psychopaths and the cold hearted, but they should be reserved to those who have taken the responsibility to protect an even higher good.

Pacifism doesn't work in a world where there are hawks. To the extent the OP suggests everyone will be a dove, I don't know the world would work with all doves. It seems like evolution didn't send us in that direction at least. So maybe that's the question: Should there be no hawks? What would they eat? — Hanover

Which is why I constantly, in my intellectual pondering, ends up in a place where "harmony" and "balance" has more importance than anything else. To find a balance that still incorporates complexity. We can't exist with too much empathy and too low empathy, both leads to inabilities to function in both emotion and reasoning.

Without some diversity of emotion we also lose much of what constitutes an emotionally rich experience of life. We cannot have joy without sorrow. We need both to feel emotionally rich. Just look at those so heavily medicated that they don't have a large spectrum of emotion, is that experience a truly rich life?

Balance and harmony is to find the middle path between the extremes. To dip toes on each side, sample the reasoning of both and have both conflicting sides exist simultaneously in order to form a complex rich experience of life. If either side becomes to strong, you will become a slave to that bias.

First off, how much of this is argued by the AI? It reads like the AI wrote it all. What is your own argument in this? Because it's not allowed to just use AI on this forum, you have to formulate your own argument. AI is allowed to proofread or to test your hypothesis, but you need to write your own argument.

Second, empathy is only part of how to solve many of society's issues. While higher empathy may improve certain aspects, it's also part of forming bias. Look at how empathy is "hacked" by marketing, pushing narratives which simplifies a conflict in the world down to a tool of manipulation. It can be used and abused like any other psychological function.

Empathy can be sharpened to be a weapon and enhancing it could make that weapon more efficient.

What's needed is a more broad empathic framework; a set of balanced emotion and introspection of those emotions. While high empathy is good, you also need to be able to think about your own empathy. This awareness of your own emotional life and how it affects your thinking is more important than just increasing empathy.

And there's also the case for certain people benefiting society by not having too much empathy. Sometimes we need someone who see past the biases that empathy forms and rationalize clearly about an issue that may need more tough decisions. Empathy can paralyze some people when they need to make hard decisions.

I'd say that the more proper way to handle this is to classify "low empathy" as a psychological disorder. That those with extremely low empathy may be needed to medicate their empathy up to a certain societal norm-value. That way we would still enable the range of necessary variety in thinking required for actual survival, but reduce the problems of low empathy in many individuals in the same way we medicate and treat other psychological disorders which are dangers to others in society.

Empathy is, essentially, sharing: the ability to recognize oneself in another and thus to understand and sympathize with their feelings, their attitudes, their condition. — Vera Mont

I'd say end it at "understand". While people debate the difference between sympathizing and empathy, the ideal understanding is that empathy does not require sympathy.

That sympathy is emotionally and intellectually agreeing with something, while empathy is emotional understanding of someone or some people.

Basically, I can empathize with the emotions that drove a murderer to commit murder, but I don't sympathize with any of it. I sympathize and emphasize with someone standing up for themselves against an abuser.

Sympathy is a choice. Empathy is a trait. Sympathy evolves out of moral understanding, knowledge and wisdom. Empathy evolves out of social understanding and mirror neurons.

If evolution has implanted within us all these cues to identify the foreigner, the question is why and the further question is what happens if they are suddenly removed with this empathy chip. Has our ability to identify those different from us become a maladaptation from a more dangerous past or does it still offer us some degree of safety from far away travelers? — Hanover

Yes, viewing empathy as something singular, different and separate from all else that makes up our psychology is a mistake. I mean, we already have lots of drugs which enhance our sense of happiness, but the downsides of that shows up quite dramatically when in between those drugs and the brain composition of people regularly taking them.

That it's not so easy just to adjust something. And especially, as you touch upon, if we all increase our empathy, our brain will change its composition to adapt to these new conditions and we will face a new set of problems.

For instance, as I mentioned above, we could decide that extremely low empathy is harmful to the individual and society and have some treatment for that. But there's also the other side of the spectrum, those with extreme empathy and who become unable to act and decide anything because they become paralyzed by the consequences to others.

This opposite condition does not have a classification yet, mainly due to it being mostly just affecting the individual, compared to psychopathy which is mostly harmful against others. But if you've ever met someone who's extremely high sensitive, the experience is of a person who's completely neurotic around any decisions involving others, showing signs of borderline disorder between depression and euphoria.

In the end, as with any problems revolving around psychological issues in society, it's about cutting off the extreme ends at which it becomes damaging to the individual and people around that individual.

Never in history has a Great Power destroyed it's own structure of power as Trump has done now. You lose credibility only once. — ssu

Yet, if the US rid themselves of this cancer and forms a new paradigm of politics with an exclusion of charlatans and the corrupt, they may return their credibility. Most people know that what drives and leads the US today is a sickness, not a vision.

The sickness need to die and the world waits for the US immune system to deal with it.

In a timely manner to what I wrote, this thing popped up. While as a non-believer I don't ascribe to the religious and spiritual undertones, it speaks towards the other things I've touched upon; the need for a sense of harmony with everything that is objectively outside of us, and that the solution is for our subject to find this harmony, not to suppress ourselves into merely becoming an objective object that fades into the background.

worry about what you can change and learn not to worry about what you cannot change. It is a philosophy of the inevitable, it posits no afterlife or immortality for us (just as the Epicureans do not) and rather counsels personal acceptance of mortality and all its attendant rigors as the way to peace of mind. — Janus

I see no difference between that and many self help strategies. Which is what I think is a problem with stoicism. It's easily adopted as methods for coping with a meaningless existence, but the detachement behaves like denial. I'd rather live in authentic emotion, in honest harmony with nature and people around me; constantly learning knowledge to distinguish my irrational emotions from my rational ones.

What point is there to detachment if there's no emotion to experience the resulting tranquility? There is no peak without a valley.

I see more stoics eventually falling into existential crisis than those who gain knowledgeable reflection to guide emotion.

A stoic approach is good for helping others as it is a good behavior for giving knowledge, but for the self it is suppressing an honesty towards existence. Emotion is part of our very being, but its the inability to understand and channel emotion properly that is the problem, not that we feel.

The idea of not worrying about what you cannot change also ends up being ignorant for fixing issues of the world. It's easy to end up in a state of not caring. Emotions about what feels like cannot be changed is often a drive into innovation that do change.

The stoic approach becomes a passive setback. In terms of the world today, many adopted stoicism in face of climate change as a way to basically live by that quote; most of climate change feels like you cannot change, so don't worry about it, it is inevitable.

In my opinion, there are better ways to find harmony and balance with existence that doesn't rely on such forms of detachement, and which is better for the self and humanity at large.

For instance? The only example that stands out to me is Albert Camus. — Wayfarer

Buddhist traditions, Shinto tradition, American Native traditions. After some searching there's also stuff like Neo-Druidism, Animism.

For philosophy, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, in some forms Rousseau as well.

The primary thing is something that I touched upon in another thread:

There's no culture around non-religious existential meditation and people have no standard framework to even begin such things. That's why people end up in either surrendering to the easy choice of religious belief, or they wallow in materialism and simple pleasures, postponing their existential introspection. But in my opinion, it's just a matter of society slowly maturing into a new paradigm of dealing with existentialism. This type of non-religious meditation on existence is for the most part extremely new in historical terms — Christoffer

Primarily that we struggle with these things because there's no really good attempts to form a cultural movement for such thinking and structuring of society. We have basically let the free market replace it all with materialism, rather than engaging with existentialism honestly and with a purpose. If the existentialists brought up the questions and examined the nihilism post-religion, there's now time for a practical solution that formulate a practice for non-religious people. It's like people are unable to think about how contemplation, meditation, guidance and similar practices essentially have no belief system at their core, but we've surrendered all such questions to religious practice, while attempting to medicate it away for any non-religious who suffers. It's either follow religion or you're on your own, which is a root cause for much existential suffering today.

But surely the aim is always to integrate the data with the hypothesis, or alternatively develop new hypotheses to account for any anomalous data. What would something 'without any interpretational properties' be, in that context? And what would it mean? The difference between 'data' and 'information' is precisely that the latter means something. So if you mean by that data which does not have interpretational properties, then how could that mean anything? Wouldn't it just be the white noise, meaningless data, that is to be sifted out? — Wayfarer

In mathematics, a solution to a long held mathematical problem is at its core not really up for interpretation or a subjective experience. The logic derives from how it intertwines with the problem and its implications for other mathematical equations. The subjective meaning of it becomes somewhat illusive, how do you subjectively experience a math problem or solution? Some mathematicians so versed in thinking about these things experience some solutions and define them as "beautiful", even though there's no actual interpretational difference between a non-mathematician and them viewing the thing. That meaning for them of being "beautiful" is also not relevant in order to explain or define the equation, so while there's a subjective experience, it's not required to engage with the information/data of the specific equation.

And many things in science has their hypothesis derive from something other than subjective interpretation. One conclusion from a set of experiments becomes a new hypothesis out of the logic it implies rather than a subjective mind interpreting it. Or we have AIs structuring and looking for patterns looking for a context we aren't yet aware of.

In essence, much of science aims to reduce as much subjective interpretations as possible. While much is of course needed in order to do actual research, I do think that what most people read and hear about when engaging with scientific literature, is a scientific communicator who's job it is to transfer the complexity of a field and making it understandable for common people or people in power. Their job is basically to subjectively interpret science into understandable concepts, into a form of storytelling.

But returning to the the mathematician finding an equation "beautiful", I think that kind of subjective reaction is close to what I'm talking about. That a scientific objective fact, a pure logic without any actual emotional values built into it, still manage to give a sense of "beauty", due to its elegance in the mind of the mathematician. It's a meaning derived from and out of a cold fact, that is for that mathematician just as emotionally valid as a meaning attached through religion. It's hinting at how there's a possibility of finding a meaning in the meaningless, without fully having to surrender to the absurd.

You're not grasping the broader epistemological point at the heart of the issue. Modern scientific method begins in exclusion, idealisation and abstraction. It is an intellectual and practical methodology for framing what kinds of questions are meaningful to explore and what to exclude, and what kinds of factors ought to be taken into account in framing and exploring them. As I explain in Section One, The Cartesian Division, central to that method is the division of res cogitans, mind, and extensa, matter, on the one side, and primary attributes of bodies on one side, opposed to the secondary attributes, on the other. That is a construct. It is not and could never be 'naturally occuring' or 'part of nature'. It is thoroughly grounded in the acknowledged and concscious separateness from nature on the part of the scientist.

So what you're saying is tantamount to asking 'hey, what if the James Webb discovered Heaven out there amongst the stars? Wouldn't that change your attitude to science?' Your question is based on misconstruing the premise of the argument. You're looking through scientific method, not at it (which also applies to — Wayfarer

You excluded the second part of it:

And now, think of what science actually did and ask yourself if there's any difference? Did it not open up a new realm of meaning? That it showed us how false narratives in religion were constructed for other reasons and that the meaning we felt in society was built on lies and fiction, of ideas of power and control? In essence, the meaning we had was false, it was a lie. And scientific objective answers have opened a door for us to actually find true meaning, not by giving an answer to what it is, but by dismantling our ability to lie to ourselves, to form false narratives that give ourselves a delusional false meaning.

In essence, does scientific objectivity actually exclude us from the qualitative dimension of existence? Or is it freeing us up to truly find it? — Christoffer

My point was that science can't provide meaning, because it was never meant to do or have that purpose. It primarily began within the hall of religion, argued out of faith, but it, by the nature of the method, began dismantling religious belief and the meaning people previously found there.

And so it removed our blindfold and put the demand on us to find meaning. That's where our subjective experience comes in. If science had proven the premises stated by religion, it would have confirmed that there was a meaning beyond this realm, but it didn't and instead society formed a culture around science in opposition to religion. Science in opposition to meaning. It became a scapegoat and responsible for robbing society of meaning, even though it was never there to provide it or had any intention to do so.

Fundamentally, if the question is how scientific objectivity never accounts for the qualitative experience of the subjective and risk throwing people into nihilism, I'd argue that it frames scientific objectivity in a relation to that experience that it did not have to begin with. The reason for nihilism and the loss of meaning comes out of the same type of inability to think about something like a complex immoral act, not just scientific objectivity.

A complex immoral act exist within the subjective interpretation of our existence already, and is presenting a dilemma to our morality. It produces similar nihilistic experiences of a lacking meaning, even without relating to scientific objectivity. It's about uncertainty, not our relation to objective truth.

It's not the relation between scientific objectivity and how it describes the world, and our subjective experience that produces this lack of meaning, it's the basic relation between a lack of answers and our need for answers. It's just that the consequences of scientific objectivity has been the largest historical introduction of lacking answers on the existential level.

This argument is two-part on your end, because on one side you're dealing with the question of science's inability to find meaning for us and the other is how to essentially cope with that.

But science never had the purpose of finding meaning for us and deconstruction of our subjective need for meaning has more to do with our lack of ability to formulate a meaning within the realm of these objective facts. That doesn't mean it's about scientific objectivity itself, it's only about our relation to uncertainty in the wake of a previous certainty rendered false.

The issue is that I'm not sure all parts of your argument follow each other. First, you have an argument for how the subjective experience is distinctly different from scientific objectivity, which I don't think anyone would disagree on. That our experience of the stone is not the stone itself.

But how does that relate to our struggle with a lack of meaning when that lack of meaning isn't due to scientific objectivity, but rather the consequence of society learning religion was false?

Our sense of lack of meaning is related to a similar emotional reactions of being betrayed. Like a friend we trusted turning out having used our trust for their own gain. And we feel anger against the one who revealed this fact to us. And now we're trying to find our place in the new order of things.

And that's where I argue for dismantling religion away from beliefs, gods, spiritualism and discern practices that does not require belief to be good and mentally healthy for us; focusing on accepting existence for what it is and find a sense of meaning in that meaninglessness. Not to accept the absurd, but to be able to honestly look into the universe and nature and accept it for what it is, to find it meaningful as it is, in that objective nature. Not to demand more meaning than it is capable of. A harmony with nature and the universe without suppressing emotions or trying to manipulate our own perspective in order to cope.

Not a credible criticism, based on any dispassionate reading of the texts. — Wayfarer

It's generally speaking, condensed down. The suppression of emotions becomes an inauthentic living, opposite to Heidegger. It's generally an alienating view in which the self detach itself, suppress itself thinking that gives harmony. But everyone feels a form of harmony through ignoring certain peaks of emotions and distancing. But it's a false sensation as the authentic experience of our emotions and engagement with the world, nature and the universe is suppressed.

And the reason it has a surging today is because it aligns with societal values of detachement. It's being used by influencers and crypto bros and people like that to justify ignoring any consequences of their behavior. And its focus on individualism aligns with the ideals of the self-made man, forming his own destiny, gaining his own wealth. The surge is because of the fundamental surge in a focus on the ego. Laissez-faire stoic ideology basically. I don't see people actually engaging with stoicism for real, it's part of their 12 steps to success strategies.

So why is stoicism your answer to solving the lack of meaning? Or giving us the ability to see beyond the subjective? Is stoicism needed in order to see past emotion or is a true, deep and authentic understanding of ones emotion equally or even more suited to experience beyond the subjective?

The mathematician knows his feeling of the equation being beautiful isn't defining the reality of it. He knows where the line is drawn between his experience and the objective. Is your argument focused on them who are unable to discern where this line is drawn? I'd say that's merely a confusion in the wake of religion dying, not an authentic existence in harmony with objective reality.

In the end, it seems to be about coping rather than harmony.

..it became evident that the self is a mental construct — Wayfarer

Yes, the self is a construct. But I would go further and argue that our mental construct is just a byproduct and emergent factor of a biological entity. We aren't even in control of this construct, we are just given an emotional experience that we are, an illusion that isn't even experienced by an acting will, the illusion and the one experiencing it is one and the same. But that's a whole other topic.

However, is all religious education necessarily indoctrination? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd say that if it's studies about religion and theology in a intellectual, anthropological, sociological and historical way, it's not. But if it's a direct programming of a belief system, either through courses and classes or even just demanded behaviors surrounding it, like prayers before class or the school day, that is indeed a form of indoctrination.

School should be about knowledge and teaching children and young people about the nature of different perspectives on topics. If one topic is taught without the insight of an opposing view, then it's a direct programming of a certain narrative rather than knowledge.

This is why it's always going to be as struggle for updating history books with footnotes and additions as while history is written by the winners, when the winners are dead other stories emerge to nuance the back view. And children need to learn the closest we can get to what is real, not what is demanded from people in power.

At any rate, it seems obvious to me that secular ideologies are every bit as capable of advocating for a sort of "indoctrination," and also every bit as capable of precipitating existential crises.

For instance, "everything is little balls of stuff bouncing around" and "any notion of goodness or value is necessarily illusory," thus "we should embrace a sort of rational hedonism," seems to set plenty of people up for nihilism and existential crises. Yet such a view is sometimes defended with religious zeal, in part because it is an essential component of some religion-like philosophies (e.g. one cannot be strong and "overcome" the meaninglessness of reality and rejoice in one's own strength and "freedom" if one is not assured that the world is properly absurd). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Such crisis is not for the school to provide. It takes a village to raise a child and the village is not school, but society at large. The solution to nihilism has to do with the necessary work to formulate a living condition free from religion, not to install religion because there's no other option. A belief should be a choice and plenty of non-religious people already have beliefs without putting any religion into practice.

What society needs is better philosophical guidance. Religion is not needed in order to prepare people for thinking about existential questions, but we just have a society that's never formulated any common practice of doing so. There's no culture around non-religious existential meditation and people have no standard framework to even begin such things. That's why people end up in either surrendering to the easy choice of religious belief, or they wallow in materialism and simple pleasures, postponing their existential introspection. But in my opinion, it's just a matter of society slowly maturing into a new paradigm of dealing with existentialism. This type of non-religious meditation on existence is for the most part extremely new in historical terms, and religious groups don't like losing members, but if religions demand respect, then so should they respect those who don't believe and need to understand that the struggle to find a sense of meaning isn't solved by forcing them into their religion.

Answering by each part my reflections on this

there has been massive commentary over centuries of how the objective sciences rob the world of meaning. The point is, for all of its objective power, science also contains a fundamental lacuna, a gap or an absence, at its center. How, then, can we expect it reveal what is truly so? What kind of ‘truth’ are we left with, if we ourselves are not part of it? — Wayfarer

In what way are we not part of it? How is scientific objectivity any different from someone stating "that is a rock". Such statements share the same lack of meaning, but it's how we relate them which gives us hints of what is true to us.

Isn't the issue rather that people expect a truth to be "out there" and given to them in a packaging that also incorporates their emotional dimension.

Is this not just a matter of emotional evolution? That thousands of years of culture operating on the idea that an emotionally satisfying truth is "out there" and that we've ended up in a state in which we realize that it isn't.

Isn't it then up to us to evolve our emotional realm to effectively find an experience that is emotionally satisfying in relation to the cold facts that science have shown?

That the only thing that essentially happened in history is that we went from constructing fantasies about the stone having intrinsic meaning, some divine purpose, to concluding those fantasies to be false.

And that we now use science as a punching bag in order to blame it for removing the veil from our eyes.

Essentially, there are plenty of philosophies and even religions of the world which do not place us humans in arrogance over nature. Whose core ideas is about accepting ourselves to be a meaningless cog in the whole that is nature and the universe.

Science is closer to this kind of thinking than the monotheistic or pantheonic concepts of meaning. And I think the modern, non-religious person may need to study how they handled it.

Because I don't think it's a crisis of truth, but a crisis of emotional response to truth. We haven't evolved into viewing ourselves in the context of a purely scientific world view.

I also believe that there are less true atheists in the world than people think. I think that most people hold irrational beliefs even when saying they're non-believers.

We are basically unable to handle actual truth, because we've yet to live in a society where we all gather around such a construct and deal with the consequent emotions together, forming a social existence and culture in which the idea of meaning comes from us and our relation to truth, rather than something external informing us of what is.

Part 2

The Lebenswelt is where objectivity and subjectivity interact — it is the shared foundation that makes objective inquiry possible. Husserl, in effect, had realised anew the role of the scientist in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. — Wayfarer

While it is true that we are always required to experience the objective truths with our subjective mind, I'm not sure the definition of a scientist is this. Science communicators are usually closer to this bridge of explaining the truths of nature and the universe into a comprehensible subjective construct that we use to understand the world around us, but a scientist can also be the one who sift through raw data and mathematically discover something that does not have any interpretational properties. How one equation connects and intersect with another is not able to exist as a subjective experience, it is simply pure logic.

This shift in focus introduces a self-awareness that naturalism, in its strict adherence to objective fact, often neglects. — Wayfarer

I would say that the study of consciousness, in some form, bridge the two. It's filled with cold facts that informs a subjective interpretation about the very object that is interpreting. If anything, the study becomes self-aware, while still operating as a naturalist science.

This feedback loop can be jarring for many people. I've experienced it myself while studying the nature of prediction coding in relation to experience; how our brain operate and take action before our conscious awareness of it. Thinking deep about this, meditating on it, it effectively making me aware of that process happening can trigger an almost panic attack as my mind is trying to consciously focus on the process while its happening.

It becomes an object of study that at the same time is subjectively experiencing itself being studied. And that feedback loop gets consciously loud.

Part 3

However, in so doing, scientific objectivity also excludes the qualitative dimension of existence — the reality of Being. — Wayfarer

Is it though? Or is the objective truth and reality being attributed with a need for meaning to the point that we define objective truth by parameters that we shouldn't? That in the desperation for meaning by the lack of religious and spiritual explanations, rather than accepting scientific objectivity for what it is, we demand of it to give us meaning, to the point of blaming it for not being able to.

That when we learn that the stone does not have some given external divine purpose and meaning, we demand of the stone itself to give us meaning. Rather than just accepting the stone for what it is, and define our qualitive dimension of existence by the fact of simply existing with it and in our symbiosis with it as part of nature.

That the role of scientific objectivity has never been to give us meaning, it has never had that purpose in the first place. It has always been about the discovery of function and truth. How things operate, what is true beyond our subjectivity.

And that the unintentional consequence was that it proved our religion and spiritual concepts and ideas to be false and fantasies.

To put in perspective... if scientific objectivity, if scientific research arrived at a conclusion that aligned with religion and spiritualism, that there is a place after death, a meaning to the universe and our existence, and that we actually found it.

How would you then think of scientific objectivity in relation to meaning and our subjective qualitative dimension of existence?

And now, think of what science actually did and ask yourself if there's any difference? Did it not open up a new realm of meaning? That it showed us how false narratives in religion were constructed for other reasons and that the meaning we felt in society was built on lies and fiction, of ideas of power and control? In essence, the meaning we had was false, it was a lie. And scientific objective answers have opened a door for us to actually find true meaning, not by giving an answer to what it is, but by dismantling our ability to lie to ourselves, to form false narratives that give ourselves a delusional false meaning.

In essence, does scientific objectivity actually exclude us from the qualitative dimension of existence? Or is it freeing us up to truly find it?

While both aim to transcend personal biases and arrive at an understanding of what is truly so, philosophical detachment seeks its goal through the transcendence of the ego, rather than by bracketing out the subjective altogether — Wayfarer

Isn't this merely due to the fact that there were no actual modern forms of science that concluded the spiritual to be false, and so the inability to detach from the spiritual and religious, affected the way many philosophical inquiries were done?

Yet we also still had logic in philosophy, which do try to detach from the subjective, transforming a concept into a form of mathematical rigor.

Stoic philosophy, which is enjoying a cultural resurgence, is built on the foundation of apatheia — not mere indifference or callousness, but a state of calm equanimity that comes from freedom from irrational or extreme emotions (mood swings, in today’s language). The Stoics believed that apatheia was the essential quality of the sage, unperturbed by events and indifferent to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. ‘Detachment,’ said one ancient worthy, ‘is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.’

The famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a work that has been continuously in print since the advent of printing, exemplifies this philosophy. In it, Marcus Aurelius recommends avoiding indulgence in sensory pleasures, a form of ‘skilled action’ that frees us from the pangs and pleasures of existence. He claims that the only way we can be harmed by others is to allow emotionality to hold sway over us. Like other Stoics, Marcus Aurelius believed that an orderly and rational nature, or logos, permeates and guides the universe. Living in harmony with this logos, through rationality and temperance, allows one to rise above the individual inclinations of what might be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ as well as external circumstances such as fame and wealth. In cultivating these qualities, the Stoic sage enjoys equanimity and imperturbability in the midst of life’s troubles. — Wayfarer

I'd argue that stoicism is a form of desperate detachment out of fear of engagement. Rather than engaging in passion with the implications of something, in this topic, scientific objective truths, the fear of these answers dismantling a sense of meaning leads to a forced detachement in an attempt to subdue the emotions this realization of reality brings.

While I agree that the ability to not attach oneself to specific opinions is good, I'd rather argue for being able to hold conflicting ideas within one larger holistic construct without attaching it to ones identity as a person. The stoic approach is to subdue emotion because it risks infecting opinions with what is emotionally good or bad, but that's a failure of agency over emotion, not the emotions themselves.

If you are also arguing for the subjective experience and its symbiosis with scientific objectivity as a preferred state of being, then is stoicism really the answer or is it merely placing you in a position where you have no real subjective experience of scientific objectivity left, rather than actually having emotions out of the implications of scientific objective facts.

What I mean is that if your goal is to find how to live with a sense of meaning in a world built on scientific objectivity, then detachement from emotion is rather the opposite.

I would argue that objective science is no answer to meaning and it never has been; it is simply a statement of the natural state of nature and the universe. The byproduct of it all was that it showed religious and spiritual concepts to be false as their meaning was merely constructs made by humans into false senses of meanings. Science or objectivity isn't to blame for this, it was a mere consequence of where the questions led us.

Scientific objectivity didn't rob us of meaning, it never intended to give us such things in the first place. It just showed us that the meaning we believed in was false and the emotions that came out of that is like the message of someone's death. A great loss. But the solution isn't to subdue emotions, it's to embrace emotions. To find our feelings in front of that stone, to let our subjective self experience the beauty of it, regardless of how meaningless it is.

Scientific objectivity doesn't conflict with our subjective self. It was never in opposition to it in the first place. We lived in subjective relation to the concepts of religion and spirituality, but now we live in subjective relation to nature and the universe as it is. I'd wonder, what is really the difference other than a frame of reference?

I provided the evidence. Were you not paying attention? — Metaphysician Undercover

No, you provided anecdotal evidence, your personal experience. If you do not understand why this doesn't work, then you do not understand the basics of critical thinking or how science works. It's as simple as that.

What is the point in trying to explain anything to someone who have such a bad understanding of scientific scrutiny? You're not even able to understand the basics of the process, yet try to operate within the parameters of it. It becomes impossible to even show you why you are wrong, where you are wrong and how, because the explanation of it demands that you understand the basics of it in the first place. An understanding that has been proven non-existent over and over now by the sheer level of the response you give. The constant rejection of critique by trying to forcibly turn the table and say the same thing back without the same critique even applying in the other direction. Like how you reject the critique of not engaging with the scientific sources of information by just saying "maybe you should read more about it", as if that applies back at a person who formulated their entire argument out of this science, who's already read enough about it to do so.

It's a display of fundamental stupidity and bias, by the very definition of Dunning Kruger and the psychological display of denial that such a person express when not able to actually address criticism. You're so proud of your argument that you are unable to process any critique it gets and so you fall back on a childish defense with "YOU TOO!" arguments.

It's impossible to engage with such a person about their argument or ideas, because you are only interested in yes-men around them. You're interested in getting praise for it, positive reviews. But philosophy is just as much about forming a good argument as it is to deconstruct and rework a faulty one. Since we cannot ignore science when talking about this topic, there are major gaping holes in your logic and ideas that you ignoring them in the way you do just makes you look like a fool.

I think it's fine in its application to the mental activity of an awake human being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or, you're just ignorant and don't engage with the actual scientific material specifically mentioning predictive coding functioning during sleep and dreaming, in the exact way I've been describing having disruptions due to the subdued or cut off sensory inputs which normally grounds the predictions, leading to the surreal experience of dreams:

The brain is a prediction machine that continually minimizes free energy—a process that persists even during sleep, when it can update its internal generative models without external sensory input. — Karl Friston

Atienza et al. (2001) reported results where MMN vanished after the subjects fell asleep but
reappeared in phases of REM sleep (Loewy, Campbell, Lugt, Elton, & Kok, 2000; Nittono,
Momose, & Hori, 2001). In this stage, amplitudes were smaller and short-lasting compared to
wakefulness which was hypothesized to result from missing contributions of frontal brain areas
to the responses as well as from unstable, brief representations (Loewy, Campbell, & Bastien,
1996; Nashida et al., 2000). — Lisa Reisinger

Phenomenological aspects of dream experiences were studied in the PC framework (26–28). During sleep, the balance between top-down and bottom-up influences changes; sensory stimuli processing during sleep is attenuated, and attention is directed away from sensory afferents toward internally generated cognitive processes (26, 29), especially during phasic REM sleep (when the most intense forms of dreaming take place) (30). Attenuated precision on lower-level priors shifts the system toward top-down processes, and prediction errors are minimized mainly by higher-order predictions (more abstract, middle- to high-level priors), in contrast to wakefulness when perception is also constrained by sensory afferents (26, 28). Moreover, even if low-level prediction errors occur, they may not reach supramodal frontal and parietal cortices as these regions are relatively quiescent during REM sleep (31–34).Low precision assigned to sensory inputs leads to the dynamic creation of novel predictions to fit rapidly changing neural activations during dreaming (30). Given the lack of external constraints (feedbacks from sensorium), the brain will jump from one prediction to another, leading to bizarre, fragmented, and discontinuous dream narratives with vague, uncertain perceptual qualities (26). — Péter Simor, Tamás Bogdány and Philippe Peigneux

That last one dives into predictive coding and dreaming, in clear support of what I say.

I reject, as pseudo-science, your attempt to apply the theory to dream activity. — Metaphysician Undercover

You aren't just calling what I argue about, pseudo-science, you actively point at these studies I've referenced and the science overall, calling it pseudo-science.

This is why I conclude you're just trying to bullshit your way out of this. Without realizing how you look while doing so.

The evidence is clear and obvious, sensing does not occur in the dream state. Further, sensing is an essential feature of predictive coding. Those two premises are well supported by evidence. Therefore the conclusion, that predictive coding is not applicable to dream activity is well supported by evidence. — Metaphysician Undercover

What fucking evidence are you talking about? And in what way does any evidence of that argue against what I'm saying? This is just bullshit rhetoric from someone believing their use of "therefore" is enough to make the appearance of an actual argument. This is below amateur understanding of philosophical scrutiny of how to formulate an argument. Using standard straw-man tactics to try and squeeze yourself out of the critique. Are you even aware that you're doing this? Or is John Cleese right about you?

Notice that the "model is used to predict input signals from the senses that are then compared with the actual input signals from those senses." If you really believe that the theory has been scientifically proven to apply to the dream state, then please explain the science. And don't simply refer to supposed chaotic and erroneous predictions that occur without sense input. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, it actively predict input signals... and because they're disrupted during sleep, the predictions become scrambled as they only rely on their own feedback. As mentioned above:

Low precision assigned to sensory inputs leads to the dynamic creation of novel predictions to fit rapidly changing neural activations during dreaming (30). Given the lack of external constraints (feedbacks from sensorium), the brain will jump from one prediction to another, leading to bizarre, fragmented, and discontinuous dream narratives with vague, uncertain perceptual qualities (26). — Péter Simor, Tamás Bogdány and Philippe Peigneux

Are you familiar with theories of adversarial dreaming? Such theories use the concept of general adversarial networks, they focus on the creative capacity of dreams, and are completely distinct from predictive coding theory:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9071267 — Metaphysician Undercover

Here's a comment posted on that same paper:

In the predictive processing literature, it is generally assumed that *at every layer* feedback forms an effective generative model of that layer. In the hierarchical model here, there is no relation between the intermediate activations in the feedforward path to those in the feedback path. This prevents the integration of top–down information in intermediate sensory areas and makes the model unrealistic.

With further answer from the authors:

First, we would like to clarify that the generative pathway in our model generates activities across all layers during both NREM and REM sleep. Second, we agree that our implementation contrasts with the traditional view of the visual cortex where all bottom-up and top-down activities are merged at every layer. From a computational perspective of representation learning, such an architecture can be challenging to train, due to information shortcuts, e.g., V1 → V2 → V1, which would prevent information (at least during reconstruction learning) to propagate to higher areas (e.g., Inferior-Temporal cortex) where compressed representations should be learned. Naturally, this issue would also arise in predictive processing models (unless explicitly or implicitly prevented) as these information shortcuts are a property of the underlying graphical model and not of a particular implementation thereof.

Meaning, it does not oppose predictive coding, not even during dreaming. Being distinct about a certain aspect of sleep and dreaming does not remove the underlying mechanisms causing it. Just because predictive coding is a large part of why the experience of dreaming is what it is, doesn't mean the system and operation is lacking complexity and this proposition is in addition to predictive coding, focused on the generative aspect of forming virtual sensations as virtual grounding.

It seems you were just skimming through in an attempt to oppose predictive coding, without realizing it doesn't oppose it at all but is a theory to explain a specific detail within the holistic topic of dreaming. It's in addition to current theories, not contradicting anything. All while still in need of follow-up due to the critique included on it. Thus, in comparison to the body of work on predictive coding, this part, is both being an addition as well not yet being fully verified outside computational simulations.

Predictive processing theories propose that these representations emerge from predicting or reconstructing sensory inputs. However, brains are known to generate virtual experiences, such as during imagination and dreaming, that go beyond previously experienced inputs. Here, we suggest that virtual experiences may be just as relevant as actual sensory inputs in shaping cortical representations.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38097096/ — Metaphysician Undercover

The quote you refer to here is not in opposition to predictive coding. What I argue for is aligned with this; that when sleeping, sensory input is cut off, but the predictive operation continues, forming predictions from long term memory to test against experiences in our short term memory. The adversarial process is just a layer that grounds this experience through virtual sensations. And for imagination and creativity when we are awake, it's the same thing, a decoupling of sensory verification using virtual verification to direct predictions from merely operating on reality. Something that in this paper is postulated to also be a controllable aspect responsible for utilizing predictions while being awake against a construct in order to form mental imaging and imagination.

None of this is a rejection of predictive coding, it's just expanding on details.

But since you're not even grasping the basics of what I'm talking about, what's the point in going into depth? You can't even represent my argument correctly in the first place when trying to counter-argue.

See above please. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not supporting the conclusion you've made, it's rather expanding in depth the argument I've been making. So I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with this?

According to your referenced material, the predictive coding process operates with the use of "signals from the senses", which are noticeably absent from the dreaming process. Therefore, predictive coding is absent from the brain process occurring during sleep. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm constantly mentioning how the senses are cut off or scrambled and how it's this very fact that makes predictions unreliable and responsible for the surreal experience. I don't know why you don't get this simple fact and constantly try to change what I say to being that the process is relying on the senses and "have to include it". It's only relying on sense input for us to operating normally when we are awake through grounding the mental predictions. But I've said, numerous times, and it's the damn main point in my argument, that distortion of sense input or a complete lack of it scrambles the prediction ability; generating an experience we can either have as hallucinations or dreams. Just because the grounding data is distorted or gone doesn't mean the brain stops trying to predict in order to reach a state of normal operation.

What is so hard to understand here? Or are you unable to read what is actually written? Or intentionally or unintentionally ignoring things in order for your brain to maintain a sense of control over the narrative? You're not even displaying a basic understanding of what I write, or you're intentionally just straw-manning. And don't try and Tu quoque the situation with some additional made up misrepresentation as another layer, that would just solidify how pathetic this is.

Sure, but the way you describe predictive coding all three parts are required for it, as essential aspects. If one part is missing, then the process cannot be called predictive coding. Clearly, "signals from the senses" is an essential aspect of predictive coding, which is missing from the dream activity. Therefore the dream activity cannot be represented as predictive coding. — Metaphysician Undercover

All three parts are essential for the normal operation when we are awake. They're essential for us to be grounded in reality in order to navigate it. Our eyes do not see any "framerate" like cameras do, they operate on very few samples from our visual sense and generating predictions in-between. This is the foundation for any visual illusion experiments you can find everywhere. It's our brain predicting what we see, "filling in" between samples images collected by our eyes and visual cortex. But this is just the basic level for our ability to see.

On a deeper level, it's not only filling in the image, but the context; your brain predicts actions and spatial constructs in order to be able to navigate in 3D space. That prediction of the larger context is formed out of long term memory which have been constantly updating its mental construct of reality since our birth. This means that the predictions made from our long term memory is extremely dense with information and constantly attempting to predict any possible outcome of every temporal sample of our surrounding reality.

When our sense data is scrambled through drugs, or during sleep, any predictions made have no temporal samples to ground predictions, so it grounds it in something else; the stored experiences in our short term memory as that's where our conscious experience has been stored when awake. But since memory isn't a one-to-one representation of reality in the way sense data produces, the predictions become distorted, entangled in the memory consolidation process. While still in debate, the adversarial process may subsequently also be part of attempting to ground this experience with a virtual construct grounding the experience of these short term to long term consolidations.

That you say that it can't be called predictive coding if one part isn't working, is just some odd straw-man attempt to render the theory invalid because what exactly? The theory itself describes what happens when parts of the chain is missing or disrupted. How does this make it unable to be called predictive coding? It doesn't even make sense as a bad straw-man response. I'm trying to wrap my head around how lost you get in your own rhetoric.

This is not a case of distorting one of the systems, it is a case of one being absent. That's why I very intentionally stressed the point that hallucinating is not the same as dreaming, when you first engaged me. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, that is you interpreting it in a straw-man fashion. I've constantly mentioned one part of the system being either "distorted" or "cut off". With clear references to "distorted" being what happens with hallucinations as they're not cutting off sense input completely, rather distorting them and thus scrambles the predictions based on unreliable sense inputs. While when we sleep they're cut off or effectively subdued, and predictions must rely on something else for grounding.

It's you who straw-man my argument into leaving out the the crucial parts of my argument in order to counter it. Who are you trying to fool here? Just go back and read again and stop waste my time with these obvious misrepresentations of my argument.

If you are so convinced by "the science", then I assume you can produce the science which shows that the predictive coding model is applicable to brain activity which occurs, with no signals from the senses. I'll be waiting. — Metaphysician Undercover

I did... it's in the reading material provided and there's enough online for you to engage with. It's not my problem that you either can't understand it, don't care to actually read, or both. Normal people do some googling and research on their own if they aren't up to date on certain sciences, but your inability or active decision to not do it seems to reflect the actual reason behind why you're arguing like this; mainly to defend your ill-concieved ideas through the use of glaringly obvious fallacies in your rhetoric, in the hope they will obscure the problems with your arguments.

You still has a burden of proof for your original argument. For which your evidence is merely your anecdotal personal experiences... still.

So again, who are you trying to fool here? Your rhetoric within this type of arrogant self-indulgent behavior just becomes epistemically irresponsible. Stating that what I provide is pseudo-science and misrepresenting what I say in some textbook straw-man arguments. It's downright laughable how obviously out of depth your are while desperately trying to keep face with these pathetic attempts to miscredit other's arguments and calling actual science pseudo-science with a straight face. How on earth can anyone with even miniscule understanding of the construction of philosophical arguments and science take what you say and your rhetoric seriously? Your echo chamber is so extreme you actually believe that by simply keep hitting back in whatever fallacious form possible is making you look like you know what your talking about. But you don't, you still look like a fool and John Cleese is still right about you.

Hence there is no time in the universe. There are only the objects, space and the movements of objects. — Corvus

Why does the object move? How can it move if there's no dimension of time? The reason we experience time is entropy. As a particle goes from coherence to decoherence it ends up in relation to entropy, forming a direction of energy and movement.

Then, our experience of time is just the resulting motion from entropic forces. Thus, time is a form of motion, of energy dissipating and spreading, of a physical process giving a momentum direction through space.

Here's a deep dive historical look into what we risk by letting the US approach the state of being an oligarchy.



That the concentration of market into a few hands, who are in allegiance with the central and highest power in the nation, is... in fact, the road to actual fascism.

And as long as it isn't prevented, it is an actual risk as this has been demonstrated building up the power behind the fascist states of the past.

It is rather interesting that in a time when all of the largest tech companies face anti-trust law court cases, they all gather around Trump and aligning with him. One has to wonder what has been said between them all off-record. But it seems pretty clear that Trump promised them something as long as they comply. And since Zuckerberg and Bezos, at the same time, removed DEI departments and got rid of fact-checking on Facebook and other social media, it's safe to assume they are all in allegiance with Trump in order to not be broken up or get into trouble with the law.

How is it not obvious what Trump is doing? How many laws needs to be broken? People getting angry when he says that he is above the law, but do nothing when he acts on it.

Isn't there enough here to warrant his arrest? Because this is as corrupt and fascist as Russia and the people of the US just accepts it. What a pathetic nation the US has become.

I provided you a very good argument demonstrating that dreaming cannot possibly be a predictive process. This leaves verification, which is related to predictive process, as totally irrelevant. That was my support. — Metaphysician Undercover

An argument needs support in evidence, otherwise an argument is just an opinion. It doesn't matter how logical it seems if its relying on conjecture as its support. It becomes a fallacy with you being biased towards your own conclusion. You believe you are right and therefore conclude yourself to be.

And this is the core problem with how you tackle this topic. You believe yourself to be in the right and therefore every answer following it just use that belief as its support, without you ever questioning your own logic as its entangled in that fallacy from the beginning.

You reject the actual science because it doesn't align with what you believe and therefore you believe that your own argument is more accurate than an argument based in the actual science. It's impossible to argue with someone who is so fundamentally entrenched in their own belief.

So-called "scientific theory" is rejected when it is not consistent with empirical evidence. That is the nature of one form of critical thinking. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, a scientific theory is a scientific fact. When new evidence is found to contradict it that doesn't mean its wrong, it means not all aspects of it is complete. It makes it an incomplete theory that requires additional parameters to explain it fully. The empirical evidence that proved the initial theory doesn't disappear just because new evidence demands a new perspective or further explanation.

Science isn't about theories being thrown in the trash can and replaced, science is a malleable shape that attempts to shape itself as close to reality as possible. Any new evidence slightly adjusts the shape to be better at predicting reality. Amateurs and non-scientists believe that science is about theories being thrown in trash cans and new ones built from scratch. That's not how science works.

And what empirical evidence do you have that rejects predictive coding? Your own beliefs again? Your own dreams? Your statement that your logic is sound, regardless of that logic being built upon your belief?

I've provided you the argument which eliminates the possibility that dreaming is a predictive process. — Metaphysician Undercover

No you didn't. You ignore the science and demand that I accept your argument as valid, without you actually having the support for a deductive conclusion.

This is the main problem, you just try to demand people to accept that you provided a logical argument, you haven't proven a single thing as you don't have anything from which your logic is built upon.

a "prediction" consists of extending the immediate past into the future, to predict what will happen. Without any sense data there is no immediate past upon which to base a prediction for the future, therefore prediction is impossible. A dream is not a predictive process. "Predictive process" theory applies only to a brain which is actively sensing — Metaphysician Undercover

You don't understand what predictive coding is and how it works. You invent your own interpretation of it and then argue against it. This is an "iron man fallacy", similar to strawman, but instead of intentionally distorting my argument, you simply don't understand what I'm talking about and starts to argue against your own misinterpretation.

You invented the idea that sense data is the root for predictions. It's not, it's what grounds predictions. This is a key point in predictive coding and you just ignore it. It's the stored memories that is the foundation for predictions. Actions are taken based on predictions out of long term memory, then verified and grounded by sense data to form a coherent action. Without the sense data, or with distorted sense data, predictions can still be made, but without grounding, they aren't aligned to a temporal and spatial experience, they start to free-flow. If sense data is totally cut off, the brain starts to predict things and only getting verification from its own source for those predictions, creating a form of feedback loop. If sense perception is limited or distorted, the distorted sense data becomes the verification alignment, distorting the predictions, hence, hallucinations. It's why people in sense deprivation tanks experience hallucinations as it's a perfect condition to lower and limit sense perception to a minimum, within a state of being awake.

Further, I provided personal evidence — Metaphysician Undercover

That you don't even understand why this is the reason you fail your argument is rather astounding. It's like you don't even know the basics of philosophical rigor. Your personal evidence is not enough to support your logic, nor to even come close to rejecting an actual scientific theory... I mean, come on, what the fuck is this?

That is my "experimental data" — Metaphysician Undercover

Experimental data requires thousands of repetitions to reach the experimental value needed to be considered a source for a theory. If you want me to laugh, you did.

It is you who is making "the dreaming mind" into an elemental object, through your false premise. You premise that thinking is fundamentally a predictive process, and then you view all mental activity from this perspective. This gives you a significantly biased perspective. — Metaphysician Undercover

What are you talking about? You're so lost in all this. That predictive process is a fundamental aspect of thinking is not "my" premise, it's a scientific theory that you reject because you don't agree with it. And then you raise the issue of being biased while you rely on your own experience as a single anecdotal evidence.... the irony of this seems too complex for you. :lol:

Instead of viewing predictive capacity as a higher aspect proper only to a highly developed consciousness, with a highly developed intellectual capacity, you view predictive capacity as a fundamental aspect of any form of thinking. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't view it like this, the science verifies this. Stop ignoring the fact that you try to reshape the scientific theory into some unsupported belief I hold. You simply don't understand the science and strawman my argument into being built on belief. It's your argument that's built on belief.

So when you look at the more base aspects of thinking, such as those demonstrated by dreaming, you improperly impose this highly developed aspect, predictive capacity, onto that base aspect, and conclude that the base aspect is carrying out the higher aspect to a lesser degree, which is chaotic and full of error. This robs you of the ability to properly understand the base capacity, for what it really is, and how it allowed for the development of the higher capacity, because all you can see is a lack of the higher capacity (chaotic and filled with errors), and you have no principles by which to understand what the base capacity really is. — Metaphysician Undercover

What science are you drawing upon to make this counter-argument? Please provide the foundational knowledge behind your concept here. Because if you have actual scientific foundation that counters predictive coding, then we can talk. Otherwise you're just presenting bs trying to demand it to be taken seriously.

Where's your foundation? What are the corner stones of your logic? I mean, actual science and evidence? I presented you with the corner stones for my argument, you have the links in there. You provided nothing other than one example of your own dream, presented as experimental evidence.

I agree that this is hard for you to explain to me. Your false premise makes "verification" irrelevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not false, it's what the science says. Why the fuck are you so dense about this? Really, why are you so unable to understand that it's not some premise I make out of thin air. Are you so in love with your own theory that you have to distort your interpretation of someone else's argument this much in order to have a sense that you are in the right? You're showing signs of absolute delusion here.

It is your theory. You have adopted it, and support it. Therefore it is your theory, and it forms your bias, regardless of who invented it. — Metaphysician Undercover

What the fuck are you talking about? Can you click on a link or is that too complex of an action for you?

Predictive coding

This demonstrates clearly what your problem is. You characterize "the processes of the mind" as fundamentally predictive, and you take this as a primary premise. Then you admit evidence which demonstrates that the mind is active even when we are asleep. But instead of admitting the evidence which demonstrates that the activity while asleep is not predictive, thereby disproving your primary premise, you wrongly assert that the activity while one is asleep is predictive. — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you unable to read what I actually write? The whole argument is that a limitation or distortion in the predictive coding feedback loop, creates the experience of distorted reality and dreams. That's the concept here. That our brain is active during sleep is a scientific fact, you can look it up, but I guess you won't and will continue acting like a fool. And since the brain is active during sleep, so is the predictive coding process. The only difference is that one part of the feedback loop is distorted and subdued, mainly the sense perception, as its subdued by glycine and gamma-aminobutyric acid. And thus, the grounding of predictions is lost or subdued so much that predictions become unreliable, producing the surreal experience.

You simply seem to not understand what's actually written, or ignore it in order to form a strawman. Regardless, you fail.

That's what I'm doing, I'm claiming that your basic premise "thinking is a predictive process" is false. So you'll never get through to me by talking about verification, because I've already excluded verification as irrelevant by denying your basic premise. — Metaphysician Undercover

You ignore a scientific theory, that I've linked to and provided further reading on, in order for your logic to work. That you don't see any problem with this is ridicules. I can't get through to you because you're stuck in your own echo chamber. You reject what I'm saying because it doesn't fit your opinions and ideas.

Simply put, you fail at both philosophy and science.

It is your theory. You have adopted it, and support it. Therefore it is your theory, and it forms your bias, regardless of who invented it. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is pure nonsensical. How can anyone read this and not laugh?

OK, let's look at this. Would you agree, that when we sleep, and we "consolidate and flush our short term memory and produce stronger neurological pathways", that this is not a predictive process? If so, then why would you think that dreaming, which is also what occurs when we sleep, is a predictive process? — Metaphysician Undercover

We are constantly flushing short term memory into creating new neuro-pathways, not just when we sleep. But the energy conservation to focus on that process is better when we sleep, forming stronger connections through more careful consolidation. Our entire being is being driven by predictive coding, it's always on, regardless of sleeping or being awake.

Why don't you read about the science first?

This is completely wrong, and misrepresentative. You are just making it up. — Metaphysician Undercover

On what basis do you form that conclusion? In what way does not the science support what I say? Please provide that in order to reject it, your opinion of it is totally irrelevant.

If "predictive operation" requires three aspects, and one of them is removed, then we no longer have "predictive operation". That is simple logic. — Metaphysician Undercover

Does the other parts stop operating on their own principles because one of the parts is limited or stops working? If you have a car that is driving at 100 km/h and you decouple the engine through the clutch, does the car immediately stop? Of course not, the wheels function is being a wheel and doing what wheels do.

A system of individual parts operating with each other does not mean that if one of the systems fails then all other systems immediately fail as well. If your liver fails, then you don't just die instantly, the body tries to continue operating based on the new conditions you're in.

The "predictive operation" is the operational mode in which all three functions normally, what constitutes your experience being awake and navigating through reality. If you distort one of the systems, the experience will alter, but it wouldn't shut off the entire system.

This is the simple logic you fail to understand. Primarily because you ignore looking up the science I'm referring to.

It appears like you are so wrapped up in your pseudo-science, and deceptive false premises — Metaphysician Undercover

Predictive coding is not pseudo science. That you talk like this while not understanding that your own logic is based on your own personal experiences is remarkably stupid.

You're just trying to create a framework about my argument that fits your own opinion. You don't understand the science, so you don't agree with me and therefor you construct this false narrative of my argument being fallacious, biased and pseudo-science in order to be in the right.

This is a complete failure of reasoning that you are totally blind towards.

When I want to think about something which occurred years ago, I "visit long term memory", just like if it was a conveniently located book store. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your experience of remembering is not the same as the physical function of long term memory. Your experience is more or less the byproduct of the function, it is not the function itself. You're debating on a six-year old level here, in which your basis of logic is your personal experience.

Do you even understand what anecdotal evidence is? And why it is a fallacy? Do you even grasp the basics of why such use of personal experiences is considered wrong to be used in critical thinking? It's like you use words like bias, critical thinking, theory, argument etc. without even understanding the meaning behind the words. An absolute confused mess.

I think it's you who needs to read up on "predictive coding". You are wrongly applying the science of the neurological activity which depends on sense perception (awake), to the neurological activity which occurs without sense perception (asleep). This has gotten you totally confused. — Metaphysician Undercover

Stop acting like you know what you're talking about when you don't even read the initial segment of the text:

...which postulates that the brain is constantly generating and updating a "mental model" of the environment. According to the theory, such a mental model is used to predict input signals from the senses that are then compared with the actual input signals from those senses. — Wiki

A) Predicting the inputs - B) compare signals to the predictions.

This aligns and grounds the experience and actions we do. If sense information is disrupted or cut off, the mental model is still trying to predict, but getting no input signals and when comparing, is biased towards the prediction. Since this is then feeded back into the next temporal moment, the prediction basically only have its own previous prediction as the source for the new prediction, gradually distorting reality and our experience. When you sleep, you subdue sense input data, but the brain is still operating in its other systems.

So no, stop trying to turn the tables and say that I need to read up on it. You need to engage with the science, because its YOU who are driving a pseudo-science argument.

The proof is in the pudding of your reasoning. Just saying that the opposing side is doing pseudoscience or being bias or not read up on something does not make it so. However, the way your reason proves you're the one doing it.

It's rather desperate of you to try and frame my argument by attacking it with such labels in order to try and discredit it. But it's so blatantly obvious how limited you are in rational reasoning.

If experience is not evidence then you are not doing science. This is more evidence that what you present is pseudo-science. — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you actually stupid? Or just so uneducated to what science is and how ti works? Do you not know what Replication, Iterative experimentation and Reproducibility is? Do you understand concepts like Empirical validation, Objective inquiry, Falsifiability, Controlled experimentation, Inter-subjective verification and Meta-studies?

Find ANY source that support your interpretation of how science works. Like, try it, try and blast me with some irrefutable source of information that is common knowledge and support the idea that a personal experience by a single person is enough to verify a scientific conclusion that this very same person is arguing for, and also reject an already empirically verified theory. Like, are you so dense that you don't even understand that your type of reasoning is the very foundation for what pseudo-science is? The text-book answer on it?

Are you for real?

Personal experience is irrelevant to you, because you are a pseudo-scientist. A true scientist knows that verification relies on experience. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, a true scientist knows that verification relies on reproducibility and prediction, on empirical validation, on objective inquiry and meta-studies to further verify and remove eventual biases.

You are trying to force a narrative that you are the only one looking at things scientifically, while saying what science "is" that is totally at odds with what science actually is.

Like, it's crystal clear how you fail at this and how far up your own ass you are. A delusion of grandeur in which everyone who don't agree with your opinion is a pseudo-scientist, to the point you actually try to redefine what science is to support your stance. It's absolutely stupid.

Maybe we can get somewhere if you'll seriously consider this statement of yours. — Metaphysician Undercover

We can't get anywhere because you are not educated enough on the topic, you ignore educating yourself further and you are stuck in an echo-chamber in which any opposing perspective are branded pseudo-science while you interpret what science is in order to fit your opinion, rather than testing your opinion against the science in order to find out if it is valid or not.

It's impossible to have a discussion with such a person, because any rational person and anyone with enough philosophical scrutiny will debate within a philosophical framework in order to get away from biases and beliefs. You're not doing this, you are doing the opposite of this and because of that, you're not doing philosophy or science.

What I ignore is the pseudo-science which you are professing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Saying it over and over doesn't make it so. You ignore what doesn't fit in your echo chamber. I rely on what the science points towards. You simply have nothing in support of your confused argument, so you rely on trying to change the narrative of the discussion in order to sound like you are right.

But people aren't falling for it. The only one who seem to fall for it is yourself. Believing your own construct reality about the discussion itself. Who are you trying to fool? I see right through you.

I am waiting for you to respect the fact that when the disruption is complete, as in the case of sleeping, the operation, which is the predictive coding process, no longer occurs. Therefore we cannot apply predictive coding theory to the dreaming mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm waiting for you to provide any actual scientific sources for your argument. Since you're never doing it, and never engaging with the material so far provided in opposition to your argument, all I have is you trying to force your belief down my throat while telling me how the science is wrong, because you say so. :lol:

In conclusion, the only thing I can provide is a reflection on your failure, presented by John Cleese.

There are some protests starting to appear but it’s going to take a lot more than protests. The Democrats don’t have a clear leader. — Wayfarer

They don't have a clear leader, but they have a clear cause. But it isn't enough, just look at younger generations who don't care about protesting or anything.

I'm trying hard not to be an older person complaining about a younger generation as is always the case in all generations. But there's something off with younger people today not caring for how to run a nation. They are generally speaking so brainrotted on social media and trash culture that they seem to be totally oblivious and uneducated about how to actually care for democracy.

I think people in power have taken advantage of the apathy that western stable democracies formed and how lazy people within these nations truly are. The constant feed of bullshit that the common people eats up and is drawn to like flies have placed them in a state of trance-apathy, wandering around like zombies without any thought going into politics and how to care for the society they wander around in.

For these young people, "the world" and "the nation" is some fiction they experience in film, series, YouTube, TikTok and games. It's not something "real".

Like, I tried to ask a group of young people why they aren't putting any effort into supporting someone their age to go into politics with representing their issues, primarily being able to afford their own place to live and the problems of getting a decent income and the combined response was simply "there's no point" and "we're just doomed".

It's absolute stupidity.

It might be that these young people had so many helicopter parents that they never developed a necessary sense of responsibility. That without it, they always seek some other authoritarian figure to take care of things, take care of them. And when such a figure isn't around as they get into adulthood, they simply give up because they have no ability to take actual responsibility for themselves or other people.

While this is a generalization and there are some young people trying to fight for themselves, it's remarkably pathetic how few there are. Compare that to any other previous generation and how large young movements were. Either through counter-culture or outright political movements.

If young people continue to act like spoiled kids never growing up and taking responsibility for themselves and their future, then this generation will be named the pathetic generation or the apathetic generation.

Especially since they're "making it cool" to just attach themselves to some older authoritarian leader. Essentially just affirming the notion that this generation is unable to grow up and continues to be children with some daddy or mommy that they want taking care of them.

There's never been a better time to shout... grow up!

Here's a question...

With how power-hungry and attention-seeking senators and politicians are, why isn't there republican politicians who take advantage of the current situation and oppose Trump? Like, use any consequence against them to build a following among republican voters who don't want someone like Trump, but still want a republican politician?

It's the perfect time for someone with their own politician ambition to stand up and make a name for themselves since Trump is the only one in focus when talking about the republican party. So anyone who's blatantly and harshly standing against him would stand out so much that the marketing creates itself.

Build a following among rational people, form alliances with the Lincoln project and any republican who's stuck under Trump against their actual will.

People and politicians need to be brave enough to risk criticism from colleagues. Where's the damn fighting spirit? It's remarkable how lazy and apathetic the opposition is.

Downright fucking pathetic really.

What we’re witnessing is the dismantling of the American Republic and the instigation of a one-party state. Plain as day. — Wayfarer

And the part of the US who don't want this and oppose this will just sit there and take it? That's just lazy.

When there's an actual takeover into authoritarianism, people will pick up arms. I think Alex Garland's "Civil War" had a pretty clear setup for why the civil war started. A president doing a third term and who used force on his own people when they opposed it. A president like this would be lynched before ever making reality of his authoritarian fantasy.

I explained to you why "verification" is irrelevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you provide no support for that explanation. I'm referring to predictive coding which has experimental verification.

No, I do not have to provide something else. I demonstrated logically, from sound premises, why your "predictive coding theory" is false in its application to dreams. — Metaphysician Undercover

"My" predictive coding theory? Sorry, but if you're to reject an actual scientific theory that has experimental proof behind it, then I'm sorry, but you're not operating on a level enough for critical thinking around this subject.

If you are to object to it, provide references to other experimental data and theories that criticize it. There are some that do this, all thought today they're in a minority due to the experimental evidence backing predictive coding.

Unless there is something experienced as "the past", there is no grounds for any prediction of "the future". Anything predicted of the future must be derived from something already experienced of the past. When you say that predictions are based on the flow of memories you admit to this. So unless you provide another source for memories, you have not any principles to deny that prediction is based in, and requires sensation. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is just you being confused about what I'm talking about. It seems you're inventing some odd interpretation of what I wrote and try to argue against it.

Predictions are based on past experiences, that's what I'm saying, but these predictions are similar to generative computation in which the generated predictions are chaotic and filled with errors. Sense data grounds this and verifies it in real-time.

If you cared to engage with the actual science of predictive coding you would understand this, but you seem to ignore it.

You have provided no principles to support this speculation that the purpose of this "memory bridge" is "better predictions". You simply assume "prediction" as your principle, and you see that this "bridge" could produce better predictions, so you conclude therefore it's purpose is better predictions. That is not a valid conclusion. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's based on how memory consolidation operate within the framework of predictive coding.

What theories are you basing your arguments on? I see no references for your rejections and conclusions.

This makes no sense at all. If there is no sensory perception then there is no short term memory. — Metaphysician Undercover

Short term memory is not just a logic-gate, it's a RAM storage, it holds experiences in short term. If you shut off the flow of sensory data, it still holds experiences in memory until its flushed into long term memory based on biases rooted in emotional values around these experiences. Higher emotional values attached to certain experiences increases their importance to become solid neuro-pathways as long term memory.

The "dreaming mind" is a mind which is dreaming. Have you never actually had a dream before? If you have, then I'm sure you've experienced your mind to be dreaming, and you know exactly what I mean by "the dreaming mind". — Metaphysician Undercover

No, you are using "the dreaming mind" as a elemental object in your rhetoric as if it was an object in support of your conclusions. The "dreaming mind" means nothing without the facts on how it operates and function and why we dream in the first place. I'm speaking of the mechanics behind it, which then informs the reason why we experience the belief in our dreams as they happen. You can't just say "the dreaming mind" as some illusive part of your argument and ignore the reasons why we dream.

Then why present me with this theory of prediction and verification, if it has no bearing on what is expressed in the op? Are you admitting that your prediction theory is irrelevant here? — Metaphysician Undercover

Because it is part of understanding why it happens. When sensory verification gets cut off, people still believe the reality that is scrambled in their experience. Because there's no other system in the mind that operates as a form of separate perception of the experience able to deduce its validity or not, it's a holistic system in which the distortion of reality and the belief in that reality depends on how well the whole system is able to operate. A gradual process that at a certain point of distortion, distorts the whole process and in turn the ability to discern what's real and what's not based on our experience of verified reality.

It's hard to explain this when you seem to get lost in even the most basic explanation.

This is clear evidence that your prediction model is incapable of accurately representing the reality of the situation. — Metaphysician Undercover

For the second time, it's not "my" theory, it's a scientific theory with experimental evidence. Look it up before getting more confused about this. If you ignore engaging with the actual science on this subject, there's no point in arguing anymore as you're stuck in a bubble of your own thinking and biases.

First, there is no separation between sensory data and short term memory, as. Sensory data is short term memory, as the thing sensed is in the past by the time sensation of it is recognized. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why are you interpreting things like this? I never said there's some separation or that short term memory doesn't store sense data. But it stores not just sense data, it stores the experience of sense data verifying the predicted reality by the brain, it's the sum that's being stored.

I don't know why you don't understand this and then believe it's an objection to past "things" stored in short term memory? You seem to get confused and then construct some weird strawman that you then argues against. It's not even a simplistic interpretation of what I'm saying, it's just a confused scramble of my argument. It's weird.

So, without sensory data (short term memory) the mind must rely on long term memory. — Metaphysician Undercover

No... ugh...

Short term memory stores the sum experience in the short term, which is then consolidated (Memory consolidation) into long term memory which is the sum of all our experiences using biases as "weights" for predicting reality. While this process is constantly happening, it's when we sleep that we consolidate and flush our short term memory and produce stronger neurological pathways.

The brain does not operate well in plasticity when we are awake due to how much energy is used for navigating reality. When we sleep is when plasticity is working optimally.

Predictive operation happens through the interplay between short term memory, long term memory and sense verification. Cutting out one of these out or distort it, will scramble the entire process, making the experience jarring for us, as we experience in hallucinations and dreams.

I can even argue that the reason we even experience dreams may be because the brain is testing the emotional response of the information in order to figure out the bias value of its importance before storing it in long term memory.

This is why dreams often consist of long ago acquaintances. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, what you experience is the brain attaching new experiences to older ones through neuro-pathways. Your recent experiences require context to be stored as comprehensive information in the long term memory and for the predictions to function correctly. These things develop from when we were born. As infants, they can't recognize objects in the same way as older children. Because they're developing this pool of information that is used to predict moments in time and for the brain to interpret experiences correctly. As their brains develop, the neuro-pathways forms into better and better predictive models until they start to operate on an advanced ability to predict.

It's why infants believe their parents are gone when they hold their hands in front of their faces. They are still unable to predict the outcome of the disappearing parent. They cannot predict the parent being behind an object (hands) and they can't predict that when the hands are moved away, they will see their parent again.

And as this process is constantly changing our brain, it goes fast, exponential, experiences in long term memory gets more and more complicated and the ability to navigate reality and perform complex tasks increase with time. After a few years, we're highly advanced in this regard, to the point we have problems quantifying how it all works. Which is why the brain and mind is such a hard subject to study. It's not just how the object operate at the moment, it's how it developed that informs the totality of its operation.

Finally, when we visit long term memories we are reflecting, or trying to learn some general principles, we are not predicting. Predicting is when we apply such principles. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are thinking about yourself as being attached from your own mechanics and functions. There's no "we" who visit long term memories. There's no agency in these processes that is attached, the process is us.

This is the problem with people who don't understand the neuroscience of the brain and mind, and the psychology of it. You believe these functions are some separate part of your mind in which your "identity" interact with it. It's what I refer to as the "arrogance of man", in which we as humans constantly elevates our own perspective and existence above everything else before judging or evaluating it. It's the reason why people become religious through the reasoning that we humans are somehow separate from nature and the universe, something higher and above it all. It's an arrogant perspective that ignores the simple truth that ALL science about us constantly verifies... that we're the products of reality and nature and can only operate as part of this system.

You do not visit long term memory. It's not a damn book store.

So the dreaming mind, which is drawing on the long term memory, because the short term is incapacitated by sleep — Metaphysician Undercover

Wrong, memory consolidation and the processes of the mind are proven to be "on" even when we sleep. You are denying the science here, making shit up to support your own ideas.

It's even written as the first sentence on the general page about sleep itself:

It has been widely accepted that sleep must support the formation of long-term memory, and generally increasing previous learning and experiences recalls. — Wiki

And since the consolidation process is the process of short term memory going into long term memory, how can you say that short term memory is "off". Like, what more sources and support for what I say do you need before accepting it?

Let me present you with an example, my childhood recurring dream of falling. — Metaphysician Undercover

Anecdotal evidence... jeez, philosophy 101. Your experience is not evidence and proof of what you say.

My dreams would progress through many stages, until they'd reach the point when I am falling. Then, with the "prediction" of hitting the ground, I would wake up instantaneously. Waking up was simultaneous with predicting. So we can see that there was no predicting within the dream itself, and the occurrence of prediction coincided with waking up, as being a feature of the mind in its awake condition, not its dreaming condition. — Metaphysician Undercover

Predictive coding at its core is not about you "consciously" predicting anything. What does this have to do with predictive coding? You're just confused. I recommend you read up on what you're arguing against before making up odd interpretations of what the prediction aspect is about.

And you're still placing yourself in detachement from the functions that make up the "you".

I do not think that this is representative of common dreaming at all. My dreams practically never have present day experiences within them. They are almost always completely removed and distinct from what I was doing that day, having no relationship to that whatsoever. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's not how it works. And you're still using your own dreams as anecdotal evidence. Come on!

People barely remember all their dreams, or all aspects of them. They're an unclear mess in which some aspects are remembered more than others. The problem with your anecdotal evidence experience of your own dreams is that the process merge recent and old memories. It can be visually a memory of the distant past, but the situation is linked to what recently happened. But the problem here is that you use your own interpretation of your own memories as a foundation for an entire conclusion about how the mind works.

Why don't you read up on actual sleep science and neuroscience instead? You can't use just yourself and your experiences to form a conclusion, that's like the most basic type of failure of philosophical reasoning.

However, for the reason explained, and the logical argument I presented — Metaphysician Undercover

No, you have not presented a logical conclusion. You have no scientific sources, you have not even addressed the most basic science on sleep and how the mind works. You use anecdotal evidence and circular reasoning in which you make a line of assumptions to fit your conclusion.

That's not even close to logical reasoning.

I believe that Predictive coding is not applicable to the dreaming mind (activity of a mind in the dreaming condition). — Metaphysician Undercover

Your belief is irrelevant when the science says otherwise. And your belief is not enough for a conclusion, it's just you demanding that others accept your fantasy concept based on your personal anecdotal experience of dreaming. This is not philosophy or science, it's just nonsense.

I think that what is misleading you is that predictive coding is somewhat applicable to a mind under the influence of hallucinogens, and you seem to think that hallucinating is the same as dreaming. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, as I repeatably have been saying, hallucinations and being under the influence, inflicts a disruption to the interplay in predictive coding, primarily sense perception verification, which makes our brain predicting unreliable and producing distortions to our experience. It is similar to how when we dream, there's also not a fully operating predictive coding function, which leads to the brain unable to predict the temporal experience of the process of memory consolidation as it sifts through it into long term memory.

You obviously don't seem to understand the basics of what I'm talking about here, which leads to you being confused about what is different between hallucinations when awake and dreams when asleep. It doesn't matter if I tell you over and over, if you don't understand the basic concept your don't understand what differs between the two and what is similar.


Fundamentally, you ignore the science behind all of this. My argument is based on memory consolidation, predictive coding and furthermore the Bayesian approach. All which are fundamental in the most up to date explanation of how the brain works. Drawing on these, forming a holistic theory of what happens when the chain of operation is disrupted, either through chemical psychedelics and when we sleep. Your argument, however, is based on wild speculations derived from anecdotal evidence that isn't even evidence for anything you conclude.

Case closed.

Oh, please can the name "orange poodle" spread online, it would anger that waste of space of a man so much.

I've taken a lot of psychedelics, and I don't think it's at all similar to dreaming. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is not what I was saying. I said that the similarities are in how it disconnects or scramble the verification process in the brain. Making the brain trying to predict something it does not get a verification to ground the predictions into an easily navigational space.

I can agree that this prediction process, is an important aspect of consciousness, but I do not really agree with the verification aspect you are suggesting. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's part of predictive coding theory which is the current dominant theory in the science of consciousness. If you don't agree, you need to provide something else that explains how the predictions are structured into a consistent experience.

I think you have this reversed, the predictions require sense perception as the basis of the prediction, what the prediction is derived from. To know what comes next requires sensing what just happened. Therefore, when sense perception is not there, in the dream, predictions simply cannot be made. This implies that what is produced in the dream state is something other than predictions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why are you concluding it to be something else rather than unbound predictions based on the flow of memories? As I mentioned, in predictive coding, it's already stated that our sensory data grounds the predictive process, so you're simply wrong against the dominating theory. The basis of prediction is not sensory perception, it's the long term memory forming a predictive model of reality around us and using sensory perception to ground those predictions into a coherent experience of time and space. Short term memory is a form of RAM memory bridge that is constantly feeding experiences into long term memory to restructure it for better predictions. This process is energy intensive and sleep is a consolidation process where we essentially flush our RAM and organize the chaotic experience into a solid long term structure. This is why sleep deprivation leads to similar hallucinations and problems similar to taking drugs and alcohol.

It goes like this: Long term memory draws from previous memorized experiences to predict a construct model of reality - This construct is tested against the sum experience of sensory perception in our short term memory - The verified experience is stored in a temporal sequence in our short term memory - This sequence restructure and change the long term memory's "biases" and "weights" for the prediction model, and the process repeats.

This cycle is how we experience consistent reality. But the process is energy intensive and our short term memory is always operating in an "interfered mode" while we're awake, balancing the real-time processing and feeding long term memory sequences. When we sleep we decouple the verification from our sense perception and let the short term memory focus on streaming the sequences to long term memory formation. It's basically an optimized phase for neuroplasticity in order to update the prediction capabilities more broadly.

If we don't sleep we're constantly operating on this lower state ability to restructure long term memory and eventually are unable to construct a reliable model of reality around us, leading to hallucinations.

When we dream, it's our experience of this stream of sequences being consolidated into a restructuring of our predictive model. We experience our brain trying to predict reality based on the stream of sequences from our short term memory, but there's no sensory perception to ground that stream of experiences that's flushed out of our short term memory. So it predicts without solid footing and we experience this interplay between old and new memories as they're being consolidated into long term memories to later be used for future predictions when we wake up.

In a dream, all of the so-called "conditions" are created by the dreaming mind. Therefore it is the brain generating the conditions directly, and the person dreaming believes them regardless of how scrambled they are. Verification is irrelevant, unless perhaps the person is lucid dreaming and has purposedly forced the desire for verification to become part of the dream. — Metaphysician Undercover

What is this "dreaming mind"? You're not describing an actual process here, just referring to some elusive conjecture called "the dreaming mind".

The reason we "believe" in the dream experience is the same reason why people believe in the hallucinations at a certain point using psychedelics. Psychosis is an intense such state where the one taking drugs fully believes in what is happening and getting an emotional reaction to it. We believe the dream experience because the verification process has nothing to do with verifying our awareness, it has to do with verifying the prediction.

Our awareness of what is real and what is not has nothing to do with the prediction and verification process. There's nothing that answers that the experience is truly real. If the verification process is scrambled or decoupled and we just experience the stream of disjointed experiences as our brain change neural structure, that becomes an experience as real as anything else.

We essentially believe what the sum of the process provides us. If we have verification of our prediction through sense perception, we believe this to be real. If we dream and the sense perception verification isn't there, we still believe in the sum of that experience.

The reason why drugs don't directly get us into a psychosis is because we've balanced the right amount to exist on the edge in which our predictions essentially predict the state of intoxication. We're predicting our experience of intoxication. But at a certain point, the amount of drugs we have in us disjoints the normal processing so much that our experience is altered by this scrambling of interplay between long term memory, short term memory and sense perception.

If going too far, we enter a state of psychosis in which we essentially dream while being awake and the experience can be so extreme that it scrambles what short term memory feeds into long term memory so much that we destroy our ability to predict correctly. It's what happens when someone gets a psychosis and never recovers from it, they essentially scrambled their prediction ability by restructuring their long term memory into a scrambled mess, which when trying to predict, does so in a way so far from what their sense perception feeds them that the process never aligns and sync up.

You are neglecting the fact that a stream of sensory data is required to produce a prediction in the first place. And this is not available to the dreamer. Therefore the dream does not consist of predictions. — Metaphysician Undercover

If your read what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying. Even though you're a bit off on the role of the sensory data (the sum experience of interplay between long term memory predictions and sensory data verifying it - is the thing that feeds the long term memory with alterations for how to predict the next moment), the concept is that without the sensory data to ground the prediction model, it can only use the short term memory's stored sequences from the last awaken state as its verification, which scrambles the experience as it's not raw data constantly grounding the predictions.

The only reason you can experience a changing experience, the sense of time in your dreams is if the brain operate its predictions. We cannot experience anything without predictions as its what produces our experience of time moving forward.

Although, an alternative interpretation could be that the time we experience in dreams is that of the processing of short term memory into long term memory - Essentially like having a solid block of both spatial and temporal data that when moved into long term memory forms an experience of time through that process. But this wouldn't really account for the behavior of dreams combining experiences of both present day and long term stored memories. That there's an interplay between new experiences we just had and memories we might consciously have forgotten about. The interplay between them is the brain looking for connections, neural paths that combine into a solid prediction before the next day.

As explained above, dreams are not predictions, and verification is irrelevant. So I think the rest of your post is derived from false premises. — Metaphysician Undercover

You essentially counter-argue with the same conclusion I've already made. Which implies you don't really understand what I'm talking about. And you're not really explaining anything, you're saying an opinion and then use that to form a conclusion. You need actual science and theories behind what you conclude, not just what you agree or don't agree with, otherwise it's just opiniated conjecture.

I think you need to read up on predictive coding and what that implies for this topic. Otherwise you're getting lost in what I'm talking about.

Here's a summery from wiki:

In neuroscience, predictive coding (also known as predictive processing) is a theory of brain function which postulates that the brain is constantly generating and updating a "mental model" of the environment. According to the theory, such a mental model is used to predict input signals from the senses that are then compared with the actual input signals from those senses. Predictive coding is member of a wider set of theories that follow the Bayesian brain hypothesis. — Wiki

This is the problem of democracy which Plato described in The Republic, and the reason why he designated democracy as the worst, or most corrupt form of government, to be surpassed in corruption only by tyranny which doesn't even qualify as a form of government. The average citizen is not inclined to educate oneself, concerning what constitutes good leadership, and ends up voting for whoever promises to please them.

In theory, democracy looks like the greatest form of government. In practice though, politics is an extremely difficult, and time consuming field of study. If a person doesn't engage oneself in this study it is likely that one will not make a good choice in the vote. To avoid the guilt of whimsy, the voter succumbs to populism or "mob rule". — Metaphysician Undercover

Which is why I've always proposed that political philosophers need to work on a successor to our current democracy. Something that begins with democracy, but evolve it into something that synthesize the people with the politicians and bypass the biases and manipulation that is inevitable through our current systems.

If the people are too stupid, lazy or uneducated to function in a democracy, and politicians so fundamentally interested in power that they would form tyranny, if they could. Then the act of intellectuals and philosophers should be to figure out a new form of government that mitigate the problems of both paths.

As I see it, there's a problem with how many functioning democracies today, fundamentally just concluded that "democracy is the end goal", just because it exists in relation to the tyranny of the world. They can only see it in this good light because of the contrast to the evils of the world. So they're blind to the problems democracy has in itself.

If people could ignore the tyranny and authoritarianism of the world and evaluate democracy in of itself, figuring out how to evolve it to another form, then that is the key to solve the issues we see in the US today.

But even so, the US system is bad even when comparing to other democratic nations. Why does the US roll out the carpet for someone like Trump, but Scandinavian nations are able to keep the bullshitters mostly away or subdued in parliament? There's a fundamental difference in government that makes a nation more or less able to be corrupted. If the US would change its system, abandon the constitution and modernize it rather than embrace it as some form of "word of God", then things would become much better for the US and the world.

The problem is that the US fought for being independent from monarchy, but in turn created a democracy that essentially operates as a pseudo-monarchy, in which King Trump basically acts however he wants, illegal or not, and there are no consequences.

The problem is that the people and rest of government in the US, just accepts it. Rather than remove him from office. The impeachment process and consequences is just a show, it's just fiction, there are no consequences for it.

Previous presidents and people in power removed themselves and resigned out of a sense of responsibility. There was virtue in handling your power with respect and care to the nation, and that virtue was a sign of high status.

Now that this virtue is gone and there's only nihilism and self-centered interests at play, there's no guardrail against people like Trump.

You are essentially winning on being anti-virtuous. You become popular by being a "bad guy". People finds it cool and edgy. And the US system isn't built for that. The US system is built on the premise that the people in power act responsible on their own, that they act virtuous.

But the Reagan administration pushed in the extreme individualism that defined the modern era. You only have yourself to be virtuous towards, fuck the people, fuck everyone else.

So the system breaks as there are no virtuous, responsible people left and there are no actual guardrails to make sure there are, keeping the monsters out of office.

This is the core of the problem.

since this form of self-deception only seems to occur to this absolute degree when I am asleep. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not really true. If you take psychedelics you will be aware of the hallucinations being fake until a point you start to believe in it. It's similar to what happens when we dream.

The closest we are to define what dreams are is that the mind, in the wake state, operates on a prediction process in which every perception we have of reality around us is a construct in our brain based on it predicting the next instance of time. Through out senses our brain "ground" our experience as a form of anchor by constantly verifying our predictions with reality around us.

There are tons of psychological experiments that verify this and how easy it is to disturb our perception through manipulation of these verification sensory inputs. The famous fake-hand experiment is one such example. When our minds prediction function gets hacked by this process, it predicts pain and gets into a confused state when the hammer is slammed on the fake hand.

What happens when we dream or take psychedelics? It's basically cutting off or disrupting the sensory ability to verify predictions. Psychedelic visual hallucinations disturbs the verification process so much that the prediction process cannot get accurate verification, and so its scrambled.

It basically makes your brain trying to predict something based on the new conditions its in, and the new conditions are scrambled. This is why we soon start to believe in them, because its not our brain generating it directly, its that our verification of them tells our brain that yes, this is true.

"I can't believe what I see" is a phrase people say when they see something they have no previous experience of. The dissonance between what they see and the brain trying to predict the reality that is fed to it through sensory data. But since the sensory data is there to verify, people quickly accept the reality they witness, however unlikely it is for the brain.

So, when we sleep, the main thing that happens is that the brain shuts off the stream of sensory input that is used to verify what the brain is predicting. The only thing that's left is the internal scrambled mess of short term memory. The physical thing that happens during sleep is that the body and brain gets rid of waste products. Its a clean-up process and part of it is to flush the short term memory and fine-tune the prediction processes for the next day.

It does this because that's our evolutionary trait that we evolved into. Our ability to predict highly advanced situations in nature relies on constantly reshaping the prediction model of the world around us and it needs the brain to operate quickly in moment to moment situations. In order for it to do so, it needs to form better neural paths that prepare the brain to act on this in automatic actions. So the short term memory stores data that is used to transform the long term memory and automatic functions. It goes through these short term experiences and finding relations to long term memories in order to optimize in what way it should predict reality in the next waking state.

This is why we learn things better when we sleep better. Just "learning" during our waking state is irrelevant if we don't get a good sleep that transfers that data into a relation to the larger prediction model of reality.

So the logical reason for why we dream and why we believe the dream we have when we experience it, is because we don't have a verification process during this phase. It's only meant to find verification or correlations with long term memory so the experience we have is pure memory data consolidating itself into a new state. We believe in it, because there's no actual reality that verifies anything, only other memories. The prediction process of our brain has no grounding and so it has no other way than to accept whatever verification that exists, which is just itself a scrambled stream of memories.

This is why dreams after intensive life experiences can be extreme. Because the brains consolidation of this short term memory is so loaded with warning signs that "this emotional overload defines this experience as extremely important for survival". And the intensity of it forms such strong neural connections in the brain that it can lead to PTST, in which the smallest verification from reality (triggers) can trigger these emotional states as the brain predicts that a similar event will happen again.

We experience triggers all the time. It's the basic function of the prediction process. Everything triggers a predictive calculation of what comes next. But the emotional levels attached to these predictions is what can cause a normal mundane automatic reaction, like when we "zone out" doing something, or have an extreme PTST reaction in which we feel like we're about to die.

So extreme experiences becomes extreme dreams as the brain tries to consolidate the level of importance that this experience has for survival.

During the process, it tests the short term memory against the long term memories, testing it out. Like someone holding up a scribbled drawing comparing it to a fine drawing on the wall. If it "kinda matches" it consolidates it into a synthesis of the fine drawing on the wall with the scribbled drawing based on how emotionally important it was registered.

This process is why dream experiences often consist of a fusion between new emotional experiences and older memory, in which our experience of the dreams have this surreal mix between old memories and new experiences.

But the main thing about believing in the dreams as we experience them, is because the verification process used in the awake state, isn't "on". Or rather, it is tuned over to verify from old memories; the long term memories and deeper subconscious parts of our mind. Our new experiences in our short term memory doesn't get verification from our senses, but rather from our subconscious instead, and so we get confused as the verification process is there telling us that the feedback loop between prediction and verification works fine.

This is the closest I can get to an explanation based on what I know about neuroscience and psychology. Some of this is verified by experiments, but the overall conclusions haven't been as of yet, although the reasoning is based on the most up to date theories of the mind and sleep.

Americans need to know that Russia has infiltrated their President. I wonder if they know they voted to make Russia great again. — Wayfarer

They don't care because they don't understand anything. That's how he got there in the first place. The majority of people who got him into office are uneducated and totally unaware of anything outside their small community bubble they live in.

Democracy in the US is not working. You can't have a representative democracy when a majority of people gets manipulated into voting against their own self-interest. So many voters regret voting Trump now, why? Because the veil fell after he won and actual reality kicked in. This shows how the US isn't a real democracy. If the US wants to be, they need to install laws and regulations that makes it impossible for someone like Trump to get into power.

But the US system is lazy and without vision or interest in actual politics. The US system embraces individual powerplays, it has fine-tuned itself to only incorporate individuals who have seats of power to gain money and reputation, it's not made for actually running the country.

It's the different authorities under the government that through bureaucracy barely manage to hold the country together. And now Musk guts out these people.

In the previous Trump period, these authorities held on and did their job, but now every layer and section of the US system is infected by the stupidity of him. Maybe the "crash" I've spoken about will come sooner than I thought. When things get so bad in the US that everyone does the reasonable thing and removes Trump from office. That's not corruption, that's the logical thing to do when someone is unfit for leadership.

And if that doesn't happen, the amount of people he guts through this chaos, there will be a lot of loners affected who want retribution. If we thought two attempts on his life was much, I don't think that will slow down. With what Musk is doing, and the reckless behavior Trump shows, how many loners will attempt retribution?

It's absolute chaos.

Sure, but private actors can’t hold it, and I think a certain reserve gets more “popular” if both the private and government sectors can hold capital. There’s also an incentive to hold a singular currency as the more who does it, the more stable it gets. That’s why the US dollar’s gotten so stable.

Don't bother with him, he's a zealot. I think this thread would be much better if people just ignored his rants. We have to endure the constant spam of Trumploving tweets and crap, but don't feed the troll, then it gets worse.

can GPT combine more factors? In a way that's meaningful? — jorndoe

It should be able to, especially the high end models. It all depends a bit on how the prompt and conversation with it is. Best is to feed it actual PDF reports, documents and research papers as it's then drawing from specific data. Going by its reasoning pattern it spent most of the time asking itself to be careful about the nuances between what constitutes a democracy and corruption, and how to form a value system to rank nations so that it incorporated the fact that some nations have a rigorous democracy, even though they also have high corruption...

Funny thing, it specifically mentioned the US when reasoning, as a state which was hard to pinpoint due to its high corruption. As a soulless system drawing on data, that kinda settles any debate on whether or not the US is heavily corrupt, seen as fleshy humans seem unable to debate such things past their biases.

Like a defense alliance of democracies or something? Hey, I'm warming to the idea. — jorndoe

Yes, here's my entire post on that for reference.

I'd say that globally, nations with good human rights values and structures should go into an alliance. Based on low corruption and democratic values within each nation. Build a military security, free trade between themselves, free movement, and a strong political collaboration. Then cut out all the nations who can't live up to those standards only to invite them when they prove to be on that level. It gives an incentive to join the alliance/union, but also a security and protection against the undeveloped shitty nations who don't give a shit about human rights. It then becomes easier to pressure these nations on their violations to human rights. And they will not be able to form that great of an alliance themselves, since they operate on so much corruption and authoritarianism that they eventually implode. We can see it in the BRICS collaboration, that the foundation is so shaky it's a parody of actual international collaboration.

I think that we should ditch the geographical locations and look more towards national values. Like a EU but globally, for stable democracies who operate on human rights. Of course there's fine details in this, but as a broad concept, there's no reason the EU couldn't expand into being in alliance with countries like Canada and New Zeeland for example. Opening up free trade and travel like that will expand the power of the union into something more than just some defense against Europe spiraling back into world wars again. — Christoffer

Interesting enough, it seems Canada is warming up to the idea of approaching EU for further collaboration. Just imagine if mineral and material trade was to become free between the two, how business would flourish on both sides leaving the US out.

Because in my concept of an alliance based on national human rights and democratic ideals, the current US under Trump/Musk would not make the cut.

I asked GPT-o3 to make a fusion list that looks at democracy and corruption, since these are two lists. It took it longer than I've ever seen GPT to do this (3 min), which speaks of how complex it is to evaluate all of this, but here's the top 100 nations out of this calculation.

Below is an approximate composite ranking of 100 nations that tend to score very highly on both democratic stability and low corruption. (This list combines insights from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2022 and Transparency International’s CPI 2022. Because each index uses its own methodology, and because “stable democracy” and “low corruption” can be measured in different ways, this ranking is only an approximation and should be used with that caveat in mind.)

Top 100 (Approximate Composite Ranking):

1.  Norway
2.  New Zealand
3.  Finland
4.  Denmark
5.  Switzerland
6.  Sweden
7.  Netherlands
8.  Luxembourg
9.  Canada
10.  Australia
11.  Germany
12.  Ireland
13.  Austria
14.  Iceland
15.  Japan
16.  United Kingdom
17.  Estonia
18.  Slovenia
19.  Belgium
20.  Spain
21.  Portugal
22.  Chile
23.  Uruguay
24.  Costa Rica
25.  South Korea
26.  Czech Republic
27.  Poland
28.  Lithuania
29.  Latvia
30.  Slovakia
31.  France
32.  Israel
33.  Taiwan
34.  Italy
35.  Romania
36.  Bulgaria
37.  Croatia
38.  United States
39.  India
40.  Indonesia
41.  Mauritius
42.  Malta
43.  Cyprus
44.  Georgia
45.  Montenegro
46.  North Macedonia
47.  Albania
48.  Serbia
49.  Hungary
50.  Turkey
51.  South Africa
52.  Armenia
53.  Brazil
54.  Mexico
55.  Argentina
56.  Colombia
57.  Paraguay
58.  Ecuador
59.  Peru
60.  Bolivia
61.  Moldova
62.  Kosovo
63.  Jamaica
64.  Trinidad and Tobago
65.  Barbados
66.  Guyana
67.  Suriname
68.  Fiji
69.  Samoa
70.  Vanuatu
71.  Panama
72.  El Salvador
73.  Honduras
74.  Andorra
75.  San Marino
76.  Liechtenstein
77.  Monaco
78.  Ghana
79.  Namibia
80.  Senegal
81.  Cape Verde
82.  Malaysia
83.  Nepal
84.  Bhutan
85.  Philippines
86.  Sri Lanka
87.  Solomon Islands
88.  Papua New Guinea
89.  Kiribati
90.  Tuvalu
91.  Grenada
92.  Saint Kitts and Nevis
93.  Antigua and Barbuda
94.  Dominica
95.  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
96.  Bahamas
97.  Belize
98.  Guatemala
99.  Bosnia and Herzegovina
100. Federated States of Micronesia — GPT-o3

Look at how many top nations are already members of the EU or in Europe. But there are really powerful nations at the top which could easily be part of a new powerful alliance.

Reform the EU into this and it would be a much more stable union for trade and military defense. It would also gain a larger geographical cover of resources. It would also need to have a clause that stipulates that any nation which falls back into corruption or risking its democracy will be excluded fromt he alliance. You can only, within these nations, vote to be part of the alliance, but the perpetual membership is based on how well human rights and democratic values are held up, including how free the nation is in speech and overall rights.

This would incentivize nations close to ridding themselves of corruption and becoming a proper democracy to opt into that work harder, effectively a big carrot to push unstable nations into stability. As well as a deterrence to uphold democratic values and civil/human rights.

If anything, it would work much better at the job the UN is supposed to do.

Call it "The Human Rights Alliance Act" or something and get a nice peaceful flag for it representing the betterment of humanity over tyranny and we can finally divide up the world into some resemblance of good and bad, with a clear goal for how to make society better.

If this comes with even the slightest religious indoctrination of children it's not a good thing. The "teachings" that are positive defenses against a chaotic modern life does not need a "...and therefor god" sticker attached to it. These children might get some good preparation for life, but they might also end up in a perpetual existential crisis as they're later thrown into the modern world as adults. It doesn't matter then that they had some good stuff in their education when their religious indoctrination becomes a major source of conflict with the world.

The question should rather be why regular, secular and liberal education free from nationalistic and religious indoctrination, aren't well versed in teaching philosophical ideas and reflection. The major problem in education today is that it tries to force feed pure data (information) into kids like they're hard drives to fill and that this is the way to prepare them, when in fact its the right questions about life and the world that needs to be taught for them to be fully functioning. Kids learn the basics of reading, writing math, society and science pretty early on, but without teaching them to be curious they become slaves of society rather than individuals with independent thought.

It's the inability to think for themselves that makes these children, as later young adults, incapable of distinguishing facts from reality, shaping them into slaves for algorithms and social media influencers who tell them to jump and they jump. Because they didn't learn critical thinking properly. They didn't get enough responsibility for their own existence.

Education must also be put into perspective of how parents today overprotect their children through almost neurotic chaos. Just today I read an article about the Canadian scientist Mariana Brussoni talking about how parents today are so overprotective of their children that they don't develop a proper ability of independence. And couple that with reflections made on young generations becoming adults far later than normal, showing child-like behaviors far into early adulthood. Education then, has unfairly gotten too much critique for failing younger people as parents have somewhat lost the ability to actually raise children in a way that prepares them for life.

Then again, US education overall isn't a good place to look for what good education should be. The fact that education quality is so dependent on economic class differences between children and families in society makes evaluating what is good or not for children problematic as there's not really a standard that can be set that properly analyze the result of the education.

Fundamentally, a free, quality education for all children, regardless of who they are is not only what's best for children, but also society as a whole. That the US doesn't realize how much of their societal problems could be prevented by just having an education on par with a nation like Finland (who ranks highest in the world), is quite remarkable. The inability of adults in society and politicians to listen to scientists and philosophers on the causal link between quality education for all and improvements to society both in terms of economics and living standards is remarkable.

So, before praising religious schools for acting like a broken clock striking correct with this, the question and challenge is far wider and more serious for US schools overall. Finland is far ahead of the US in terms of educational quality for all children, but even in this state there are challenges to improve further. Maybe the US needs to first just adopt a modern understanding of education and its role in society as a means to lift up the general population as a whole before getting to the details of the educational quality in general.

It's better than military influence, right? — frank

I don’t know. At least military action has obvious counter-actions and power plays that are quantifiable. This entanglement into every corner of global trade and industry gives them insight into so much more than traditional espionage and an ability to circumvent normal channels of influence.

People in the west are so naïve as to think that a communist state would operate on the same divide between the free market and government, but there’s absolutely nothing free about the market in China and therefor any influence by corporations with takeovers and establishing business in other nations is opening a back door into their nations that people believe is just about some Chinese company… no, it’s both the company and state involved.

This is why national security in almost all free democracies warn about Chinese companies growing too powerful within their borders. Compared to the Vodka-fueled absolute moron-state that is Russia, China is smart and plays the long game into power. The only thing at the moment that can ruin things for them is their own economy collapsing.

The world economy is too integrated right now to do much about the reserve currency. Somewhere down the line they might change, but I don't see how it really makes much difference. — frank

It can also change slowly by more unnoticeably exchanging currency into something else. And only after a more broad overview will it be obvious that nations change currency reserves into something else. In order to not unbalance the economy too much. The Chinese reluctance has more to do with how China use business to become powerful. The obvious mistake that Russia is doing is believing that they can use military force to gain geopolitical power, but that's an old dream for conservatives. The new world order is that of China's strategy to buy in and own companies in other nations while setting up dependence trade between them and the rest of the world. Effectively making them too much of a pillar of world economy to ever be threatened by war. Some understands this and sanction against China, but far too many are naive and stupid when it comes to how China operates. Like, I don't understand how so many naive and stupid business owners in Sweden want to establish factories for Chinese companies, and then when national security deny such business to be established based on national security issues, these CEOs are surprised and sad they couldn't start that business. The lack of education and knowledge about this is astounding. I'd say, regardless of how effective a business gets by using China, cut down and cut out business with China completely until they show themselves to be a nation functioning on human rights values.

I'd say that globally, nations with good human rights values and structures should go into an alliance. Based on low corruption and democratic values within each nation. Build a military security, free trade between themselves, free movement, and a strong political collaboration. Then cut out all the nations who can't live up to those standards only to invite them when they prove to be on that level. It gives an incentive to join the alliance/union, but also a security and protection against the undeveloped shitty nations who don't give a shit about human rights. It then becomes easier to pressure these nations on their violations to human rights. And they will not be able to form that great of an alliance themselves, since they operate on so much corruption and authoritarianism that they eventually implode. We can see it in the BRICS collaboration, that the foundation is so shaky it's a parody of actual international collaboration.

I think that we should ditch the geographical locations and look more towards national values. Like a EU but globally, for stable democracies who operate on human rights. Of course there's fine details in this, but as a broad concept, there's no reason the EU couldn't expand into being in alliance with countries like Canada and New Zeeland for example. Opening up free trade and travel like that will expand the power of the union into something more than just some defense against Europe spiraling back into world wars again.

We seem to have somewhat adapted or learned the pitfalls of printed matter; perhaps we will eventually adapt to the internet. — unenlightened

The printing press had people of power misuse it and people in power eventually gets overruled by history and the people. Internet has no ruler or power above, so the only way to keep the stupids from continuously spreading misinformation and disinformation is to either regulate what can be expressed online, similar to what can be spread through normal media (press ethics) and what can be uttered in the street (law), and that the consequences of breaking it is as severe as to make the people self-govern their expression.

If that is too much for free speech absolutists, it may be that people get fed up with the trash pile that these stupid people create. The absolute pile of garbage that gets bigger and bigger with each idiot who spews their bs onto it, and the bots perpetuating and exponentially making it bigger. So people will migrate away from any online sphere that cannot regulate this type of behavior, eventually maturing into online spheres that are able to regulate in a similar manner as society outside of internet operates.

The latter is most likely. We're already seeing people trying to find some other existence online than the regular Facebooks, TikToks and X. Bluesky is an example of an attempt at something opposite to X.

But I think that the endgame would be to create actual public service social networks globally. My concept for that would be a UN-funded (by international funding from all democratic nations), social media which incorporates a number of services that operate like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok etc. but doing so through a collaboration against disinformation and misinformation that is more extensive than the billionaires are able to. Since it will operate as a non-profit, it will not drive algorithms for that profit and don't pull people into addictive attention economies that fuel ragebait and hate content.

Such a site would probably function using a sophisticated AI that is used to interpret hate speech, misinformation and disinformation in real-time and if spotted freeze the content for more in-depth analysis. The running of these social medias and the continuous cleanup of bullshit will be the main focus of the non-profit company and funded by all free and normally functioning nations of the world with the aim to battle against services which operate on the previous type of capitalist gaining ideas and political manipulation of elections.

Such a service would essentially create a divide between the free market versions (like the regular Facebook, X and TikTok), and this new non-profit version. As governments will promote these over the older types, it will get into the hands of young people faster and be more of a service to society than operating on profit and the market. It will feature no marketing content.

Governments could then also band traditional market-driven social media, especially for young people and only enable these non-profit social medias to younger people. As they grow older and are given the choice to move over to other more profit-driven services, I believe that the ease of use, the known standards of the non-profit system and the disdain for marketing material being blasted everywhere on the older type social medias, will eventually strangle out the older actors in this field and remove them from society.

A way of dismantling social media and how it looks today without creating a void of no social media at all. It may be that when older generations die, we will see more of this as more technical understanding generations get into more societal power.

But I may be too much of an optimist. However, any crisis of society and civilisation leads to people trying to build something better. When the bad actors swing and hang, there's a responsibility for the survivors to learn from the mistakes made.

How do Americans benefit from the dollar being used in global trade? It's just something the world did because of perceived American stability. — frank

Which region and currency could be considered more stable going forward? Canadian dollar? The Euro? It could very well be that the Canadian dollar takes over if the world look for stability. The Euro is entangled in so much internal problems in the EU and with the threat from Russia it's going up and down all the time; however, the Euro might also be stable because it is entangled in so many nations, making it a true international currency rather than tied to a single nation. If crypto doesn't end up being a world currency, the Euro might if the US dollar keeps getting hammered by the ideocracy that is the US.

As long as society promotes and values stupidity over expertise and knowledge, we will have this kind of world.

The internet eventually formed the best way for the stupid to be louder than the wise, and they are constantly loud because they have time for it as they do not engage with knowledge with the time and care that the wise are. So the wise aren't heard, the few who speaks are drowned out by the mass of the stupid people who flock online as its the only place they get the feedback they crave for.

Stupid people have always craved the attention they emotionally feel is unfairly given to the wise, but previously, you had to be wise and know a lot in order to be heard. No one would invite a stupid person into a news studio in order to comment on a serious matter. But the internet didn't have such gate keepers.

And even the most stupid person will find their audience; like emotional gravity clustering together people into bubbles.

My prediction is that there's going to be a collapse in society, but I believe it will be these bubbles that collapse. At some point, the stupidity will become such a singularity that it collapse in on itself and then we will have the remaining stupid people craving for guidance by the wise. Making it a virtue again to be educated, wise and an intellectual.

Especially since the stupid masses drive away these educated people, at some point those stupid masses will only have one of their own guiding themselves. And we're somewhat seeing this with Trump and his political allies. And we see that many of the people who voted for him are now suffering the consequences. -How soon will they crave a wiser person to guide them, to understand they are too stupid to govern themselves?

The fall into deeper and deeper stupidity will not go on forever. The stupid are doomed to shoot themselves in the foot. The question is what world that comes after; what principles and morals.

Will there be an increased intolerance against the stupid? A rejection of equality based on it? A new form of intellectual class division landscape in which society is portioned up by intellectual ability?

While in the light of how the word is today, that sounds much better, it's obvious how such a society easily spirals down into oppression.

Regardless, any historical polarization ends in some form of large conflict that lifts up the intellectuals who tries to form a new paradigm for society. When and how that conflict appears is unknown, but since the internet is borderless... it will be borderless.

Maybe the next world war, is a civil war for the entire planet. No nations, but the gathered polarized masses of the entire world. A non-patriotic war, based on imagined narratives that clustered together through emotional gravity and bias. Until enough people die to wake people up.