The Nobel committee has obviously been making more political choices in recent years and Dylan's poetry is extremely political. I believe they see themselves today as one of the few remaining ways to criticize the empire of the US where 60% of the population demands the government and mass media they call evil lie to them for their own protection. The arts are one remaining way to do this and, for example, Conan O'Brien does a regular routine where he has his staff record hundreds of "talking heads" news announcers all spouting the same B.S. verbatim. People just laugh and laugh....

Words only have demonstrable meaning according to their function in specific contexts and even the neurological evidence supports that grammar is acquired by pattern matching and is merely the proximity of syntax or what you could call a shortcut. My own writing incorporates contextual vagueness where I frequently use the most vague of the more popular definitions, usually among the top three most popular definitions. That way I can explore what I'm writing for any humble and elegant simplicity within the metaphors and produce a recursive logic that allows me to expand on what I'm writing. It takes longer, but it produces results and can reconcile grammar with what I'm writing.

Japan had an epidemic of suicides when their economy fell in the toilet with mostly young men who had no hope of finding work killing themselves in a particular forest out of shame. Similarly, the Dutch have a high rate of suicides who tend to leave nasty notes blaming their boss, evidently, the legacy of Calvinism. Notably, it is money that is doing the driving in both cases, money that encourages women to wear high heals the closer you get to a major urban center, money that is the central issue. People who earn less than $34,000.oo a year, close to the poverty line, are fifty percent more likely to commit suicide, while those earning over roughly $75,000.oo are not likely to become any happier. Those earning significantly less than their neighbors are more likely to commit suicide as well.

Is it rational? Is it ethical? These days many people diagnosed with terminal cancer are choosing to commit suicide in order to leave their wealth to their children, thus, helping to keep their children alive.

Its merely a political argument, rather than a philosophical one. Sexism, racism, speciesism, etc. are all concepts that gained popular recognition with the invention of human rights which only emerged as a political movement due to modern technology turning the ancient practice of slavery into a nightmare on a grand scale. The average life expectancy of slaves working in the cane fields, for example, was five years, yet, they were so cheap it was still worth shipping them thousands of miles and losing up to half of them on the journey alone.

Notably, it was also money behind the adoption of human rights with the industrial north merely taking advantage of another opportunity to exploit the cotton farmers of the south. Something like 80% of Americans at the time were against freeing the slaves and when the constitution was changed to grant them equal rights as citizens the first thing those with money did was to insist it be interpreted as meaning corporations are people.

The idea that sexism, racism, etc. have been eliminated is laughable. In fact, there are an estimated 350 million slaves in the world today and even in the state of Louisiana women are still making 66c on the dollar for the same work as men. Nor has communism provided any sort of viable alternative to the problem of money and power doing all driving and, until it is resolved, progress will remain piecemeal at best.

Perhaps the best argument today against speciesism and allowing money to continue to do all the driving is the simple fact that within twenty years commercial fishing will become impossible due to their no longer being enough wild fish left in the oceans while, within fifty, every wild land animal larger than dog is projected to become either extinct or only exist in zoos. Humanity is killing itself and ranting and raving about morality or whatever has proven to be all but totally useless. What we require is something that can compete better against the mindless practice of merely following the money wherever it leads.

The idea that we have a choice in the matter is a narrative. Even objectively speaking, according to the evidence collected by Donald Hoffman if the human mind and brain had ever remotely resembled anything like reality we would have become extinct as a species.

Habits are the end of honesty and compassion, the beginning of total confusion! Academics attempting to be objective about everything have inspired people like Malthus, Hitler, and Dawkins who take it as license to spread hate in the name of survival of the fittest.

When money does all the driving, nobody is steering and the guy with the gun in the backseat decides what is socially acceptable. The more wealth inequality we have, the more obsessed people become with their being socially acceptable. For example, the closer to a major urban center you get, the higher women's heals become because raising a family in a city where you can't go deer hunting and grow a little garden is not an option.

A quick search on the subject confirms your opinion. Thanks for the heads up, it seems it is modern evolutionary biologists who reject the term. Evidently, Darwin was not terribly creative in bed. :)

Darwin rejected the idea of survival of fittest and claimed evolution was all about which species is more adaptable to the specific environment, while the joke is that, "Sex is never about survival of the fittest, but of the most creative". That's where I think evolutionary theory has yet to actually mature is that they are still thinking in strictly causal terms instead of more creative ones. For example, Donald Hoffman is a Game theorist who spent ten years studying all the neurological evidence and running one computer simulation after another, only to conclude that if the human mind and brain had ever resembled anything remotely like reality we would have become extinct as a species.

Merely by assuming evolution is about survival of the most creative the more complex the environment becomes, it makes much more sense out of religion, psychology, and everything else. You might say everything that exists reflects the initial creative impetus of the Big Bang still expanding to this day. Mathematicians came to a similar conclusion recently upon examining causal physics and classical mathematics. They discovered that any number of simple metaphors, such as everything is composed of springs, strings, or even vibrating rubber sheets for all I know, can provide equally accurate explanations.

After forty years of research academics have finally proven that the republican party is organized along the same lines as a flock of chickens. Its really no surprise to anyone, but what it means is that their basic philosophy revolves around Three Stooges slapstick and the principle of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and obeys a simple memory centric systems logic.

Chickens are are so dumb a Missouri judge legally declared them walking vegetables, and their memory centric systems logic is the default way for them to organize and is the same way our own neurons organize. In fact, a chicken's behavior is not significantly different from any one of their individual neurons precisely because they are relying so heavily upon their memories. By pecking at one another they ensure that those with the better memories become the higher ranking chickens by default again because, obviously, those who can't remember who to peck and who to avoid learn to avoid pecking anyone or suffer the consequences.

Anyway, conservatives adopting the same default systems logic reflects the fact they are a largely rural population continually struggling to fend off the encroachment of civilization. Already the family farm is all but history in places like the US and the rise of terrorism among both Christians and Muslims can be attributed to their simply defending their lifestyle using whatever low tech approaches actually work. The IRA in Ireland, for example, defended the largely working class poor and won serious concessions before abandoning their fight.

Its an objective fact that our words only have demonstrable meaning in specific contexts. For example, if someone says, "She's Hot!" they could be talking about anything from a good looking woman to a hamster with a fever, a boat, or whatever. The more specific and explicit the context, the more explicit the meaning becomes. If you rely upon a dictionary definition it will merely take you in circles because objectivity and subjectivity define one another like up and down, back and front. Whether you wish to call everything being context dependent an objective or subjective fact is always up to the observer.

The amount of working memory is the only criteria anyone has ever discovered for measuring someone's career potential. When looking for a career the question you should be asking yourself is how good is your memory.

Just a word of explanation, I'm agnostic and all my poetry reflects that fact treating both mother nature and father truth as merely ways of making the subjects more personal. We are all mother nature and father truth as much as anyone else we might believe ourselves to be.

Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and people are social animals. To ask if we are too social is like asking if fish swim too much or birds fly too much. The problem isn't whether we are too social or whether social acceptance is stressed too much, but how has civilization distorted our natural inclination to be social. Today there are routine protests of magazines retouching photographs to make already stick thin models look even thinner and toy manufactures selling things like Barbie dolls that are so disproportionate they would have to be seven foot tall just to survive. Its similar to the now largely abandoned Chinese tradition of binding women's feet because treating one another as abstractions is the cause of a great deal of confusion. Lao Tzu said, "Habits are the end of honesty and compassion, the beginning of total confusion!"

Whether existence is ultimately nonsensical or not, the fact it can be objectively perceived as such means meta-ethics, rather than ethics or morality, must apply because, obviously, life still makes a great deal of sense even if it is ultimately nonsensical! If life is nonsensical than we are nonsensical and its pointless to ask the question unless, somehow, nonsense can make sense! Everything being context dependent means whether anything including life, the universe, and everything appears to make any sense to us simply depends upon the context.

I'm writing a book on the subject and this website doesn't have enough bandwidth.

A paradox is an example of a metaphor in that it has no clear identity. We are the belief makers, we give it all meaning, and in doing so create our own metaphors. Socrates used the metaphors of the memory of God and repeatedly proclaiming that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing.

Politics obey the Law of Contention which is the aggressive enforcement of the principle of the excluded middle. Its the same systems logic of a flock of chickens where see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil becomes an end unto itself prompting many to mock their own political system and the mindless masses. For example, in Italy one province elected a popular porn star to office who fought for them in ways that nobody else could have, while it is now illegal to vote for Mickey Mouse in the state of Maryland. If Americans could vote for Mickey today he could embarrass the hell out of both parties and chickens are nothing if not the masters of acting indignant.

Natural law concerns what Socrates called the One Truth or memory of God that none can remember in all its glory. Its the greater context that the unfolding truth determines everything and creation becomes a collaborative effort. Darwin should have said, sex is never about survival of the fittest, but the most creative. Everything that exists resembles the initial creative impetus of the Big Bang as the smallest pond can be the busiest place that can shed light upon the Big Picture.

There is no single morality and studies have repeatedly shown that even common sense is a myth. The only thing common about common sense is nobody seem to have much anymore. Murphy was an optimist.

We already have gladiators fighting to the death on football fields. They may not die as nearly as often on the field, but they certainly cripple one another all the time. However, going too far in that direction doesn't inspire people to invest money and the western half of the Roman empire collapsed.

Morality isn't the issue. In ten years of asking if anyone knows the simple distinction between a lynch mob and a democracy nobody, not even academics, have ever answered correctly. Likewise, I've discovered just by asking people that half the people online are suspicious of the common dictionary and like to make up their own definitions with very few of them even being aware it merely contains popular definitions. You can't have morality or a democracy if nobody can agree upon the meaning of the words.

According to the National Science Foundation, one in five Americans insists the sun revolves around the earth but, what I'd like to know, is how many of them imitate Three Stooges see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil slapstick. Money doing all the driving ensures the lights are on, but nobody is home.

You're wrong, no zoo can still make money if their animals are unhealthy and fighting all the time. The US can talk all it wants about blacks being equal under the eyes of the law, but they know damned well they are not. They can talk all they want about them killing each other and trashing out their own neighborhoods, but they know the landlords own everything. During the Rodney King riots one of the first places they trashed was the Korean owned convenience stores that were always overcharging them.

In the ancient Roman empire the peasants, who were half the population, would routinely riot and storm the palace with knives and pitch forks whenever they starved in the winter knowing that kind of internal unrest is an invitation to invade the state. Claudius the emperor installed a sheltered harbor to ensure they could always bring food in come winter. The Chinese turned rioting into an art form and, to this day, can kowtow with the best of them, only to riot by the millions if for one second they start to believe nobody will prevent them from being seriously exploited.

Money can only do all the driving for any real length of time if it happens to agree with natural law.

I'm not arguing that money and guns shouldn't be doing the driving, merely that political correctness is one of the few ways of preventing them from escalating into total chaos. The black riots in the US are the direct result of the fact the money and guns are doing all the real talking worth listening too for them. Any animal in a zoo would do the same if their living conditions were inhumane trashing the whole place because they really couldn't care less anymore if it just makes it even worse. One zoo I visited the monkeys were so crowded they threw their feces at the visitors just to pass the time.

When money is doing all the driving the gun tends to do all the real talking making political correctness one of the few peaceful ways people have left to defend themselves. They killed Socrates merely for asking questions of those who agreed to listen because the Truth doesn't support money doing all the driving or the gun doing all the talking. He was showing peasants how to question their increasingly corrupt religious, academic, and political institutions which was simply unacceptable. That people today are inventing terms like "political correctness" and struggling to recreate his legacy merely reflects the economic inequality in the world today.

Oh, how silly of me.

The moment I become perfectly humble I insist the whole world know.

Classical logic obeys the principle of the excluded middle, meaning every version of formal philosophy is biased explaining why it historically has been used to promote intolerance and bigotry. Where you decide to draw the lines and call someone a bigot rather than merely intolerant is one of those popular issues they argue over.

The fact that the world around us is analog rather than digital has been widely accepted for a long time and quantum mechanics have already been used to prove life is metaphorical rather than metaphysical. The problem is that digital logic inevitably leads to logical contradictions it can't resolve any better than to just deny something is possible. Digital logic, for example, insisted that the earth must be flat for thousands of years because, obviously, it can't be both flat and round! Analog can overcome these problems by simply assuming everything is context dependent and adapting to whatever the situation requires. An analog computer like the brain, for example, produces analogs or metaphors of whatever problem it is attempting to solve rather than insisting the evidence conform to the logic.

Digital logic is also horribly inefficient and just not viable when you start crunching the kinds of enormous numbers the brain routinely does, but that's just another way of saying that reality is analog because you can derive digital logic from analog, but not vice versa. The advantages of digital logic are that it is easier to do error correction and use a more brute force approach to problem solving which, for example, is why digital logic is used in computers when it takes up much more space on a chip and is much more inefficient. Manufacturers have been counting on the fact that the chips keep shrinking so fast they don't have to worry about its drawbacks, but are currently focusing much more on analog logic as Moore's Law is about to end up in the toilet.

Greenland uses geothermal energy to run everything including to smelt aluminum which they are the largest exporter of in the world. They are merely leveraging what resources they have in a resource poor country. Similarly, the Tibetans have practiced polyandry for ages as a way to control their population because they only have so much land that can be cultivated. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, but what the world requires is someone to take the lead rather than merely treading water or falling to earth.

Without awareness robots possess no knowledge, only incomprehensible data.

Experience is a river that remains the same by constantly changing. There are many lesser truths, which are both contents and contexts in different situations and, then, there is the One Greater Context of the One Greater Truth... that the Truth determines everything!

The US looks prepared to take the lead if they want to with most of the fundamental research being done there. What everyone is waiting for with baited breath are graphene supercapacitors and reel-reel printed solar cells. Already the big car manufacturers in the US are preparing the first all carbon body factories and, theoretically, you could even retrofit existing cars with graphene supercapacitors lining the inside panels and get a thousand times the power to weight ratio of batteries.

You can even throw all that carbon on the ground and its like piling up leaves and print solar cells on the body so you'd never see them. That's a ways away though, but there's also long time interest in the roofing industry to produce the first widely adopted low cost solar shingles that last decades without maintenance. Storage capacity and instillation costs are a big part of what's holding people back, but the supercapacitors could be ready for prime time in just a few years and you can already make crude ones using just a home dvd laser.

Most notably, the ability to make a wide variety of extremely powerful magnets out of dirt cheap materials has just been discovered meaning all the motors for cars and golf carts and everything else will become much more powerful and cheaper to make. Just to make a point Mercedes Benz built a 900 horsepower van that looks like an economy van. Even 400 horse power is just ridiculous for an internal combustion engine and they are all about to become history and not a moment too soon for the planet. Already several countries have been investing heavily in research to make useful products out of all the CO2 in the air using solar power to turn back the worst effects of global warming.

Donald Hoffman is a game theory specialist who spent a decade studying all the neurological evidence and running one computer simulation after another only to conclude that if the human mind and brain had ever remotely resembled reality we would have become extinct as a species. Reality is analog whether classical logic says it is or not and an analog brain is a type of computer that produces analogs or patterns of what it is modeling rather than obeying classical logic. You can claim ignorance on the subject, but this is a fundamental fact of neurology that has been known for a long time. The remaining issue to be proven just yet is how scalar the architecture happens to be, but its only a question of time.

The implication is that the brain is more fundamentally a self-organizing system like a coral or a bee hive or whatever and only incidentally resembles a computer. Like an abacus it means its input and output can be the same as we occupy the lowest possible energy state of the system. The same should hold up for all the different parts of the body which can be viewed as resembling one another fundamentally because everything would resemble everything else to some degree. The fractal nature of everything explains why every single sell organism operates by quorum sensing and countless other issues with the remaining question being how do all these fractals fit together in everything to produce the Big Picture.

The middle east has no other resources to exploit other than the sun and the oil they possess. That's like say fish are to be admired for exploiting water.

No, I'm saying that over the next century we will be rewiring and re-plumbing the entire planet, but that's a big job and doesn't happen according to our personal schedules or desires. For example, somebody just figured out how to use carbon nanotubes in asphalt to both heat the road for de-icing and make it last fifty times longer or something ridiculous. These are often the kinds of duh! moments that if people rush into a big job like this they live to regret. Star Trek is coming in the very near future and then its down the rabbit hole or toilet of your personal preference.

To put it perspective, the sum total of scientific data now doubles in as little as nine months, yet, only recently was the first apparently complete quantum mechanical model of five hundred states of matter confirmed. Its like the elemental chart for physicists and they've only now created the first version. Within a hundred years they will have achieved the dream of the alchemists, but the next twenty will give us a much better idea of what to expect. Once you know what to expect, people with big money will push the technology ahead.

They only have the money to invest in green energy because they sell their oil to everyone else.

The irony is the Middle East is contributing to global warming and has money they must invest in their future.

Yin-yang dynamics rule the universe indicating a recursive systems logic must apply to everything imaginable and be so simple a child can understand with everything revolving around what's missing from this picture. In other words, I am not unconscious, therefore I think. The content of the universe including any truths can be said to revolve around the void with a black hole merely providing one extreme example. It means consciousness and awareness would express the same self-organizing systems logic that everything else would and science would never be able to prove whether we have free will or not. Whether our lives are fated or we have free will or anything else would always remain context dependent with everything eventually turning out to be self-contradictory.

I don't see what the problem is. From the ground the earth looks flat, from orbit round, from far away a dimensionless point, and from the other side of the universe its as if it had never existed thanks to the Hubble Horizon. A context without any content and vice versa is a demonstrable contradiction, while any context and content will demonstrably transform into one another. I think therefore I am because sometimes I'm unconscious!

Awareness and knowledge are indivisible complimentary-opposites and you can't have either one without faith in the other.

What I'm describing is known as a recursive self-assembling analog "scalar" logic and they say the first thing you learn about systems logic is half the world has no clue such a thing is possible. That includes the English speaking half of the world because classical logic is way too dualistic and digital. Unfortunately, digital just doesn't cut it when you start talking about extreme contexts such as the countless neurons in your brain.

E=MC2 is simple due to the recursive nature of the logic involved and it should be possible to reformulate Relativity and quantum mechanics as a systems logic that reconciles the two. Poetry in motion and crap rolling downhill can be considered the analog and digital perspectives or wave and particle. Poetry in motion is the lowest possible energy state of the system with a car in idyll being a good example because the lowest energy state can leap faster into any higher one.

What is coming is a self-organizing scientific revolution that will transform the world with the new manufacturing capacities merely representing the tip of the iceberg. Currently the money and guns are doing all the talking worth listening to which is how its been since the beginning of civilization but, within twenty years at the outside, the change will begin with confirmation of a theory of everything that makes it no longer viable to do business the old way.