Slightly out of order, but here is a McGilchrist talk - 30 mins overview of his stuff in case anyone is unfamiliar.

Asbestos is another; clogs the lungs and I think irritates causing inflammation lung cancers... Sahara sand blows into Europe occasionally. Sand in the lungs is also not great. Any foreign body can literally block the little tubes. likewise I think one can line the gut with impermeable indigestible plastic sheeting. There are also breakdown products particularly of things like PVC with chlorine atoms instead of the usual hydrogen that are not good for the system, but my chemistry/biochemistry gets a bit vague here. But organic chemistry tends to produce unwanted byproducts in a rather messy way - like dioxins for example. Generally, I'd recommend keeping foreign bodies out of the home body whether I'm talking to fish, fowl or fool.
But it's mainly a diversionary scare story, in the context of the current catastrophe of climate change. There's nothing quite like the danger of turning into a woman to exercise the terror circuits of the average cockwomble. Worse than being possessed by the devil!

It's an invidious comparison. The environmental effects of estrogenic pollution are not negligible and the direct effect on humans include a drop in fertility and an increase in prostate and breast cancers. It's a problem worth addressing, and sooner rather than later.
Micro-plastics is probably more serious as a cumulative poison or rather cocktail of poisons that travels up the food chain like DDT or heavy metals and generally cannot be either sequestered or eliminated by the body. It is a major benefit of plastics that they are not biodegradable and that is why they are so popular as food packaging, electrical insulators and so on. Early electric cable was insulated with waxed cloth and wrapped in a protective sheath of lead. Ah, the good old days! It was as easy to recycle as it was dangerous to use.

But neither of these problems can compare with the existential threat that climate change poses to the whole of humanity. In this context, they serve as yet another diversionary tactic.

I've had college algebra, trig and calculus.
I can also design trusses and figure pressure loss in pipelines. Doesn't that sound exciting. — Mark Nyquist

Well then, when in over your head, retreat to dry land and build a bridge.

This thread is just a dream. Do not trouble to respond, folks.

I'm in over my head — Mark Nyquist

When in over one's head, it is recommended to keep one's mouth shut, and head for the shallows. People have drowned in these waters.

022

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in his 1981 book "After Virtue," argues that moral discourse since the Enlightenment is not rational and therefore empty. He believes the reason for this is that the morals of the Enlightenment lack purpose - teleology. The scientific revolution, armed with Darwinism, brought an end to "purpose." One was left to define morality on their own terms. This led to the moral relativism of the individual.  

But now a new tribalism has returned, with the left-brain, visually oriented individualism of the Enlightenment giving way to the right-brain, auditory tribalism of the Global Village.  And with it a return to moralistic thinking.  

 Hegel believed that morals consisted of group ethics that progressed over time, centered in one's family, one's socials spheres and communities, and the state itself. Perhaps the Hegel Renaissance seen over the last few decades is a result of the correspondence of his teachings to this new reality.    — Blurb

As you might imagine, I am quite onboard with blaming the Enlightenment for everything; the relativising emotivising and downgrading of morals, and the overemphasis on the individual.

However, the "right-brain, auditory tribalism of the Global Village" does not, I fear signal a return to social values. Rather, it is rampant individualism with an additional private army. Novak has allowed his genial progressive positivity to get the better of him. We are heading for the slaughter bench of history.

If the purpose of life is to transcend the limits of physics, and the purpose of intelligence is to transcend the limits of biology, then the purpose of existence is freedom - the nothing that 'directs' everything.
The will to freedom is a better formulation that the will to power, because power is always only relative - a big fish in a small pond would only be a small fish in a big pond.

But freedom is the left hand of responsibility; this is how ethics is sublated from the direction of history. Thus the measure of freedom as progress is kindness. As Margret Mead relates, the first sign of civilisation is a healed fractured femur, because without the sustained care of the community, one with a fractured femur could not survive. Political correctness, however, knits no bones.

"Perfection or damnation." Thus saith the Lord.

A carrot usually works better than a stick. — Agree-to-Disagree

Well, donkey, unfortunately, carrots are going to be running short, and sticks too. But thistles will probably survive somewhere or other.

"All you need is love."

(But I need a whole lot more.)

Yes. everyone should become a professional roller skater. War would end, and everyone would be happy.

021
Not much Hegel, but quite a lot of McLuhan. And an interesting light shed on this discussion: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14989/how-to-do-nothing-with-words/p1

... amongst other stuff.

020

This episode traces the increase in human freedom from the totem ritual of the prehistoric primitive horde through the male genetic bottleneck in the agrarian revolution to the Hegelian “knot” in liberal democracies. This knot, which needs to be worked out, is more prominent today than ever. It is when individual and identity group demands come in conflict with principles that uphold the state.  — episode blurb

"DNA analysis has shown that 8,000 yrs ago 17 women reproduced for every man.
Male parentage began to decline at the beginning of the agrarian revolution. " Novak 020 (my rough extract.)

My own take on this is rather different from Novak's. He starts from a typical primate society of males competing for dominance, and seeks to explain the genetic bottleneck thereby. This I do not think works because it does not explain what changed or why. Not Freud, but Marx has the better explanation here. The agrarian revolution produced surplus. It produced settlement and accumulation, land must be cleared and improved to become productive and the labour produces an asset as property.

This gives an importance to inheritance to intelligence as distinct from its importance to biology. The 'natural' inheritance system would be matrilineal, because there is no question who the mother of an infant is. And it is this natural system which would have to be overturned in order for male dominance as between men to become dominance over women and specifically the control of female sexuality.

The patrilineal system of inheritance is what demands the control of women's sexual partners and this motives the dominant males to impose sexual exclusivity. Property motivates, and also provides the means for a male to continue to dominate well past his prime, when nature would have him deposed by youth.

019 020

This is hard for me to write about and I have been putting it off.

First, there is a problem with finitude in that it is defined negatively. 'Fin' is end, and the finite ends. This seems to show up in physics in various ways, substance dissolves into waves, finite particles are not particularly anything, but probably... So there is the same relation between finite and infinite as there is between being and nothing, which is one of instability; each becomes the other.

Now I'm going to quote myself from elsewhere when this was in the back of my mind and I was thinking about something else:—

Well I think I understand a distinction between physical, biological, and social determination, roughly like this.
Physics decrees that everything falls towards the ground with a terminal velocity dependent on size and density such that it cannot move further from its place of origin further than the average horizontal wind speed at the time takes it.

Biology overcomes or rather exploits physics in the Dandelion by producing a seed with long 'fingers that trap a large volume of air producing a seed with a terminal velocity due to gravity so slight that the mildest turbulence in a gentle zephyr will propel it upwards to such an extent that it can travel the whole globe. Just one of many ways that biology attains heavier than air flight. Spiders manage the same thing by spinning a kite-string of silk into the breeze until it is long enough to pull them into the air.

Intelligence evolved as a way of speeding up adaptation to an unstable world by the preservation of social learning, such that if one monkey learns to fish for ants with a stick, or crack open an oyster with a rock, the tribe will copy them without biological evolution occurring, and the behaviour will be preserved as long as it benefits the tribe. And thus the limits of biological determination are likewise circumvented.

Biology does not break the laws of physics, and intelligence does not break the laws of of biology. Nevertheless much different shit goes down in the city from what goes down in the wilderness., and what goes down in sterile conditions. Humans are biologically flightless, but have learned to fly round the world. — unenlightened

Now I feel as if this triad of my own, that also defines a direction towards complexity and freedom rather close to Hegel's but in modern terms, through the exploitation of feedback that creates fractal complexity down to the quantum level, and thereby can exploit the fundamental freedom from finitude inherent in the physics and direct it.

The evolution of the universe to a state that allows life, and the evolution of life that allows intelligence dives a direction towards meaning that in Hegel becomes the moral imperative. And the hippies, who never read Hegel except through the distorting lens of Marx, nevertheless caught the essence of the thing. How could all this ever have been about the silly little thing that is a human individual? But the struggle of the whole of humanity to get off the slaughter bench of history and be free to create - that is something! "All I want is all the life in me to be free." Free love and peace, man!

A slightly interesting way to envisage moving beyond the myopia of organismic or species centres identity. your daily dose of academic weirdness.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/intelligence-as-a-planetary-scale-process/5077C784D7FAC55F96072F7A7772C5E5

Excuse my lack of an actual answer, but life is too short to try and understand syllogistic logic through a translated 2000 year old text.

Instead, have recourse to something like this: http://intrologic.stanford.edu/materials/logicinaction/ch3.pdf

Well I think I understand a distinction between physical, biological, and social determination, roughly like this.
Physics decrees that everything falls towards the ground with a terminal velocity dependent on size and density such that it cannot move further from its place of origin further than the average horizontal wind speed at the time takes it.

Biology overcomes or rather exploits physics in the Dandelion by producing a seed with long 'fingers that trap a large volume of air producing a seed with a terminal velocity due to gravity so slight that the mildest turbulence in a gentle zephyr will propel it upwards to such an extent that it can travel the whole globe. Just one of many ways that biology attains heavier than air flight. Spiders manage the same thing by spinning a kite-string of silk into the breeze until it is long enough to pull them into the air.

Intelligence evolved as a way of speeding up adaptation to an unstable world by the preservation of social learning, such that if one monkey learns to fish for ants with a stick, or crack open an oyster with a rock, the tribe will copy them without biological evolution occurring, and the behaviour will be preserved as long as it benefits the tribe. And thus the limits of biological determination are likewise circumvented.

Biology does not break the laws of physics, and intelligence does not break the laws of of biology. Nevertheless much different shit goes down in the city from what goes down in the wilderness., and what goes down in sterile conditions. Humans are biologically flightless, but have learned to fly round the world.

Horses live in harems with a dominant male that kills all the male foals until he becomes too weak. But humans can and do make conscious choices and arrive at wildly diverging arrangements of their societies. I'd prefer you didn't imply I hold opinions that I don't hold. Patriarchy is more common than matriarchy in humans but it is not universal, and therefore not biologically determined.

I wanted to know if the general thought here was that hierarchy is artificially instantiated. — AmadeusD

No the thought was more particular than that. Hierarchies are naturally occurring in many species, with nothing I can see of artifice or artificiality. That is uncontroversial. But they only happen in socially cooperating species. That sometimes gets neglected.

You're not lacking an excess of negatives there.

Most people, most of the time will do what they are told. This is right and proper and the necessary foundation of civil society. We stop at red lights, obey the highway code, shut the gate in the countryside, pay for stuff we want from the supermarket, pass the salt at the dinner table and so on. Tyrants and other criminals take advantage of our amenability and it is unfortunately necessary to be vigilant against such exploitation, both on one's own behalf and that of one's neighbour.

It should, however, be obvious that tyranny and oppression can only come into being as parasitic on such a pro-social basic tendency; prey does not cooperate with predator. What the tyrant does not understand is that the chief belongs to the tribe equally as much as his servant does. The hierarchy is efficient only when it is superficial, and interests are not divided by it.

The suggestion is to form an orderly queue
— unenlightened
"An orderly queue" for what? Dying? To be executed? — baker

It is really rather tedious to have to explain one's creative use of idioms, but at the second quote from you of the same phrase: it is a cliche of British English used in many ways ...

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/02/06/forming-an-orderly-queue

... for example.

It is the proverbial way we Bits organise every cooperative undertaking, and in my usage above should be taken figuratively not literally to mean that the suggestion is to organise cooperatively to deal with the situation as best we can for the benefit of all.

It that sufficiently clear for you now?

Tyrants are the criminals. T — Fire Ologist

Yes, but ... a tyrant always functions with a conspiracy of bully boys, without which he is no more than a hate filled loudmouth and at worst, a possible serial killer. A tyrant always functions with consent, not universal or enthusiastic, but widespread and tacit "because good people do nothing". I am saying if you are an extermination camp guard, you are criminally responsible, but if you are just a close neighbour of the extermination camp and pretend not to notice the smell, you are morally culpable, but not criminally culpable.

They can't do anything about climate change because ... climate change!

You heard it here first.

That is quite the achievement considering how much the West has been exporting it's heavy industry to China.

Somehow, I am not totally reassured.

It’s like an idea or an argument. If you can read you can usually understand what someone is trying to say. — NOS4A2

And that's something different from the action, obviously, because Banno's words are quite clear, but his "point" is not. How can this be? It's like the starter's pistol makes a noise, and that somehow makes all the competitors start to move, as if everybody had already agreed in advance to do that. Like the agreement had a universal force in that moment such that the bang 'meant' "Go!"

The one handing over the cash is almost sure of dying if he disobeys. The military revolting against a tyrant (or a very large number of citizens revolting against a tyrant) are almost sure of putting an end to injustice. But they don't. — LFranc

Sometimes they do. but the point of my example is to illustrate the principle of proportionality. One should not risk one's life for something trivial, and conversely, one should not refuse to risk one's life for something of vital importance to many people.

But one cannot depend on a very large number of citizens for one's own action. Sometimes the large number need one to be the leader of the revolt, sometimes at the cost of one's life.

If citizens are to be held responsible for the acts of their leaders, aren't all of the Palestinians responsible for the October 7 attack/murder/rape of non-combatants? If they should all be held responsible since they didn't stop the attackers, then how can we say Israel is committing war crimes or doing anything wrong when Israel just trying to hold the right people responsible by attacking all of Gaza? — Fire Ologist

You are confusing things here. Citizens have responsibilities in relation to the society they live in, and hence for the actions of the government. But 'holding someone responsible' is something that a court does on an individual basis, taking account of particulars. One cannot convict a whole population of any moral failure, but must prove it of each individual, showing that there were things they could and should have done that they did not do, and/or things that they did that they could and should not have done.

I love it when you speak strictly. :love:

But loosely, it's a protection racket, eh? You can get behind with your payments, but eventually ...

Your point isn’t clear from the letters you put on the screen. — NOS4A2

What is this "point" you speak of as if words can have it in some way - clear or obscure?

Does Trump think it's just a protection racket? — Benkei

And would he be wrong to think that?

Are citizens responsible for the crimes of their leaders?

They are, in general, the victims of the crimes of their leaders. That is, to the extent that one's leaders are criminals, one is living under a mafia. Now to live under a mafia is to live under coercion to support criminality, but to support criminality under coercion is still wrong, even though coercion is a powerful mitigating factor.

There is thus a duty to resist the coercive rule of a criminal government that matches the duty to obey the legitimate rules of a legal government. A duty therefore to speak truth to power and resort to civil disobedience if necessary. These principles were worked through during the Nuremberg trials.

This aligns also with the principle that if one kills another under coercion - at gunpoint, say - one has still murdered, though with mitigating circumstances, though if one handed over the cash of the bank at gunpoint one would not be committing robbery because preventing one's own murder would be the legal priority.

the truth table for "This sentence is false"
— Brendan Golledge

It's not apparent what such a truth table would be for such self-referring sentence. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Ah, if you guys had only participated in my thread on The Laws of Form, you would have discovered that such self contradictory sentences are formed by "re-entry" or recursive definition, and result in truth values that oscillate in time.

Logic is static, and does not deal well with time, but presumes an unchanging block of eternal truth. But sometimes the cat is on the mat, and sometimes the cat is not on the mat. Cats are fickle.

What have you done to promote the education of women and giving women more access to reproductive health services? — Agree-to-Disagree

Well back in the day, I was involved with a collective that supported a women's health group that was being trained by a maverick doctor in secret in the subtle art of very early abortions by aspiration, which was and still is an illegal intervention that women can use to control their fertility. but I am not going to share further details with you because - make up whatever idiotic reason you like.

I can chew gum, but I don't because it is a filthy habit.

Why aren't climate activists making more effort to promote the education of women and giving women more access to reproductive health services — Agree-to-Disagree

What makes you think they aren't? Some of us are so smart we can walk and chew gum at the same time!

For example:— https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12687/matrilineal-matriarchy

"Look, the other guy does it too." seems like a weak defence in law, and an even weaker justification in political discussion. This principle works both ways though. So my only remaining question is, "Was democracy always a sham, or has it only just become one recently?"

My feeling is that in the UK at least, there was a moment after WW2 when something like a democratic choice existed, and the people voted for social security and national health as a real alternative to the rule of capital and privilege. In the US, that never seemed to happen ?

Explains Trump's popularity - he's always there!

We infer it from playing peek-a-boo as very small persons with entertaining adults. You guys have such short memories!

Yes, It's almost as if the Chinese government had planned it. Their population will decline as productivity increases, stabilising at a level their agriculture can sustain. No such good news though for Africa, India, S. America or Indonesia, unfortunately.