Well if you don't have 50 hours or so spare to listen to the podcast, I'll try and give you a shout if I hear anything that might sound like a bit of an answer. But a quick scan of the first couple of pages of that thread confirms for me the wisdom of letting someone else do the hard work while I sit in my armchair and nod. But you do have me about right, in that I am looking for a philosophy that will sustain a view of psyche and consciousness and personal identity that at least leans somewhat in the direction of geist, because the individualism of today feels immiserating and false.

I have not listened to the podcast, but based on what is said here, rather than putting the question of mind into question it sounds as if the question has been answered in favor of a universal mind with its own purposes. — Fooloso4

Well that is my understanding of where we are heading in broad terms, but for sure Hegel doesn't answer on page one, but arrives there, and I am listening to what is a tertiary source not reading the original, so if you want to argue, I am not your man. I am looking to understand what is being proposed and that is all. Please don't critique Hegel on the basis of my student beginner's crib-sheet.

002

Quite a lot of placating of science-botherers here to counterbalance the woo of the introduction. Speaking of which, I have decided that A Course in Miracles is too steeped in Christian language and symbolism to be combined here, and the metaphysics is very different anyway. I might try to do something with it at some stage, but not here.

so we get the first classificatory system logic, nature, and geist, more or less titles of books or book sections, but the suggestion here already is that geist is in a sense the working out, or the interaction, of logic and nature. And this triadic form looks like it's going to be thematic, and the introduction of time as a way to resolve inherent contradictions.

003 This is the beginning of the logic.

Presuppositionless Being, is the same as Nothing. "If something has no attributes or properties at all, it is in fact nothing." So being and nothing cannot be distinguished and being becomes nothing and nothing becomes being. So there is the third term again, 'becoming'.

And from there we go into a discussion of time and flow, and becoming of course encompasses unbecoming, which you may or may not have heard of elsewhere. It is mentioned here that time is not in the logic as such, but as it is the 'science' of logic it immediately plunges into being and seems to imply time even though time is not a dimension of logic as such.

Hopefully that will become clearer as we go on, or someone here will clarify it for me?

I'm uncertain if 'stipulated' moral guidelines inherently possess genuine hearts."? — YiRu Li

This is a stipulation:-

Without genuine hearts, morality becomes hypocritical. — YiRu Li

And one I agree with. When I say 'stipulation' I mean such a defining or contextualising statement. So, I assume Confucius had a genuine heart when he said this, but it is the person who acts or speaks that does so wholeheartedly or hypocritically - for example, one can honour one's parents genuinely, or one can pretend to honour them to gain some favour from them. Statements themselves have no heart, but are mere rocks in the stream.

Thank you very much for that little lesson in written Chinese; I know nothing of it, but it is a very different system, and I strongly suspect that it results in a slightly different way of thinking, that is - I'm guessing - more immediate and holistic.

Isn't it the false promises of neoliberal capitalists on the right side of politics who promised these people the garden of eden; only to flush it with factory chemicals, doubt, fear and rage? — Christoffer

Well yes it is. I'm not going to disagree with the story, but I am disagreeing with the moral of the story.

The great and the good are responsible for the man in the street, and they are responsible for the man in the street's education. A society that produces a mass of people who can be led astray by false promises of a few bad men has FAILED. This is the bottom line of a democracy, that it has to produce people that value democracy otherwise it will become an autocracy.

So it behooves "decent Americans" to look to their own failings and the failings of the whole society, because their stewardship has led to neoliberal capitalists and deplorables and Trump.

Not all. — wonderer1

Yes I was generalising about the overall effect of US society as a whole, which has produced trump supporters in millions. I accept there are decent people, but the democratic government and the society as a whole has produced Trump and his acolytes by the million, not a few exceptional odd-balls.

The implication of the existence of millions of deplorables in a society is that there is something deplorable about the society as a whole.

One thing cannot be denied though, that the culture that produced such a bunch of ...

downright utterly stupid people who basically joined a massive cult — Christoffer

... is Western liberal democracy as practiced in the US. All the clever sensible people who wouldn't ever join a cult surely neglected their responsibility to educate their fellow citizens rather better than they have done, because clearly those people are not capable of educating themselves. That their cruel and imprudent behaviour to their brothers is now having undesirable consequences should have been predictable and should have been avoided, so perhaps they are not quite as clever and sensible as they think.

No, but I doubt they would admit it.

Supratrochelar. — javi2541997

What a nerve!

What good is a goodneness that is weak? — baker

A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.
Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
— Lao Tzu

A moral equality is stipulated.
— unenlightened

Authentic Chinese civilization has never stipulated the concept of equality or morality; it is referred to as 'Tao.'
'Tao' could be translated as 'The Way', 'Science', 'Key Point', '20/80 Principle', or 'Enlightenment Thinking'. or even 'Holy spirit'. — YiRu Li

I have read Chuang Tzŭ a long time ago, and have an outsider's understanding of Tao. I think morality as understood in the West is more in tune with Confucius' thought. A matter of duty in a social world. Confucius is more secular, and Taoism more spiritual. Ruling a country is like cooking a small fish (don't over do it.) It's a great government that can take that sort of advice!

The problem is that you (plural) don't know whom you're up against and you don't even care to find out what it would take to win against them.
— baker

What would it take to win against them?
— Fooloso4
I'm not sure, but playing the good boy/good girl and expecting them to play good boys/good girls certainly isn't working. They just laugh it off. — baker

Here is a frame of good versus evil. Within this frame there is no possible answer. How can a fair player win against a cheater? They cannot, they will always lose to the aces up the sleeve. And the conclusion then is that the good guys have to cheat like the bad guys do. The old gold of "They go low, we go high" does not work, it is fool's gold.

Therefore the first step towards a solution must be to reject the comfortable fantasy that "we" are the good guys, and "they" are the problem. Because clearly, for a large minority of America, it is the other way about. Clearly, for these people the game is already rigged so they always lose and they don't want to play by "our" rules any more.

And that is the plain truth, that the game has been rigged from the beginning, to favour the few, the establishment. This has been somewhat hidden because with strong growth in the economy few have to be losing even in a rigged game. As long as the deplorables get their bread and circuses, they won't notice anything.

There's no shortage of circuses, but the bread is running short. That is the problem.

As a humorous aside, Trump's statement is incoherent. — EricH

It's a lesson learned from advertisers, that incoherent statements cannot be shown to be false. or inciting, or threatening, or irresponsible - because they say nothing. It happens a lot, and it's deliberate, learned and practiced, and every time you hear it from a politician, you can be sure they are a crook, because no serious politician is inarticulate or linguistically incompetent.

more than an insignificant fringe — jorndoe

Those that can might like a listen to The Coming Storm podcast. A review here.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/08/the-coming-storm-review-gabriel-gatehouse-bbc-qanon-conspiracy-movement-now-where-were-we-podcast-barry-cryer-bob-gemma-cairney-gets-classical

Mcarthyism deserves dishonourable mention in this context.

• Fascism is the revolution of the entitled.
  
  
• Declining powers are vulnerable, because we have been taught that growth is normal and decline is a crisis.
  
  
• There is no special virtue in the American psyche, that would make them immune.

Not just California - I'm not French.


Meanwhile here's a cheery site that aggregates greenhouse gasses into a CO2 equivalent measure, and finds that when all the gases are accounted for it is equivalent to 500 ppm currently. Or rather, a while ago.

https://gml.noaa.gov/aggi/

Fortunately no one understands or cares about that either.

I remember having an epileptic fit from overheating many years ago in a vineyard in the South of France. It was ever thus, but now more-so, and it's only just begun.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31122023/california-farmworkers-dying-in-the-heat

[quoteTao Te Ching]Heaven and earth are ruthless;
They see the ten thousand things as dummies.
The wise are ruthless;
They see the people as dummies.

The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the center.[/quote]

Dummies caught between heaven and earth are not entitled to make universal judgements. The cunning of Geist is to use your suffering and your despair to hold you to its purpose. One fantasy fights another.

The EU has a principle called "Subsidiarity", which is that decisions should be made at the most local level possible. A Global issue such as climate change needs a global agenda to be agreed, and then local implementation. Likewise, we need global pollution limits, and local control and inspection.

The path for US government will be bi-directional according to this principle, a devolving of power to state and on to local government on the one hand, and and submission to, and support of, global organisation - the UN, court of Human rights, and other multi national bodies on the other.

Edit: another principle should also be to set a limit to the number of governing bodies having jurisdiction over anyone to - say - 5: global, (sub?)continental, state, county, and parish for example. [One more or less might be arguable.]

First off, one thing that no one wrote out but that I assume many of you know is this: Government workers are more inefficient not only due to complexity but also due to less pressure in the workplace. Governmental positions are "comfy". This is because that their efficiency isn't directly tied to their continued "survival" as it is in a more profit driven workplace. — mentos987

I thought it was competition that made for efficiency in the private sector.

There is a lot of controversy over big government.
What does that mean? — Vera Mont

There is a lot of confusion about government. Take water for an example. A chap needs clean fresh water on tap, and sewage and waste water drainage and treatment. A chap needs not to have his neighbours' sewage flooding his home or his yard. or his clean water supply. So because water flows and moves from here to there, all this needs to be organised by someone and as long as it is done, one is willing reluctantly to pay for it. Whoever organises it, provides it, and takes a chap's money for it governs the chap. So when water and sewage is 'privatised' there is not less government, just less democracy. This ok to the extent that we all agree about what we need and don't have to care about the fine details. Except when the owner doesn't do the job properly, and then one needs to govern the governor.

We live in degenerate times. And our opposition leader is burbling on about growth, as the solution to all our ills, when any fool can see that we need to be dealing with climate change and flood mitigation, and growth is not going to happen and would not improve our lives if it did. Unreality prevails because reality is not pleasant, and actors are therefore our leaders.

It makes me wish this Fellow were eligible. I'd vote for him. — jgill

have people started to warm up to RFK Jr. yet? — Tzeentch

Kind of sad that all one can find to choose between for president are dynasties of wealth and privilege and old movie stars.

It seems a commonplace that rights and privileges arise together with duties. Thus in this case, the privilege of running for office entails the duty of respecting and supporting the institutions that enable running and decide the outcome. Just as the right to own property entails the duty to respect the property of others. This called a social contract.

Now it is open to any individual to repudiate the social contract, but in such case they become outlaws; one cannot both repudiate ones' duties and still claim one's rights, and expect the least respect or consideration from others. To be an outlaw from an evil society is a respectable position to take up, but don't expect any consideration from said evil society.

Trump is a whinging outlaw, demanding the respect and protection of the very social community he has disavowed. So fuck him and the moral vacuum of everything he says. And if America votes for such hypocrisy, Fuck America too.

Article 1 All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood

UN. Universal Declaration of Human rights.

A moral equality is stipulated. It is to be understood that we are not equal in talent, physique, intelligence, inheritance, education, power, social standing, opportunity, wealth, or personal morality. Nevertheless, every individual from the lowest to the highest socially is the source of values, and as such is infinitely valuable to themselves. and this is the source of the equality that founds the moral brotherhood of man. for a Christian -

And the King shall answer and say unto them, ‘Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me — Matthew 25:40

Thus the duty of the peasant is to feed his family, and the duty of the Emperor is to feed his people, and the duty of those that have much is to look after those who have nothing. And this duty arises immediately alongside the privilege of ownership. If you expect others to respect your property rights, you need to respect their right to exist. This is called a social contract. It is a mutual arrangement for organising social living, that allows farming and thus cities and civilisation.

I offer here the most definitive, authoritative sources of the West on your topic, and my best interpretation of them, which will no doubt be disputed here.

But I will be most interested in hearing from you how this very general formulation aligns with Lao Tsu, Confucious and Maoist philosophical traditions.

Myself, I wonder why this particular forum, which is mainly concerned with philosophy, ought to accomodate never-ending threads on vexatious topics such as Middle Eastern politics, which is famously divisive. — Wayfarer

May I humbly suggest that every site inhabited by humans needs a waste disposal system. If we did not have the controversial threads, the controversies would infect all the philosophical threads more than they already do. But there is no reason why we should put up with people who only come to use the facilities and never entertain us with some pleasantries at the very least.

I have no recollection of any real philosophy. I certainly remember aggressive posts and mainly negative posts. I had a brief look, but came up empty apart from anti-left, anti covid, anti philosophy; I don't feel like it is a great loss to the forum, but someone could show me some gems if I have missed them.

I don’t hear 6C being mentioned as a probable scenario much. — Mikie

I am reading that directly off the graph I posted earlier. It is not a modelled prediction, just a bare "well that's what it was the last time". and here is the link again. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi5177

This is obviously based on indirect measurements, because direct measurements of CO2 levels in air bubbles in ice cores only go back 800.000 years, and our CO2 levels are off that scale, as you know.

So the nearest comparison you can see on the graph is about 16M yrs ago. That in itself is a scary number, because we are talking about a climate far from that which humans evolved in, and a time when the earliest apes were living.

Recent temperatures have exceeded model predictions by a scary margin, and masking by shipping pollution in the atmosphere has been suggested as a cause of underestimating the sensitivity to CO2 levels.

But I think there has also been a strong pressure towards conservatism in the reporting. We know how it goes, "don't give the sceptics a target" So always much climate action is assumed in the models, everything is conservatively estimated.

Along this trajectory, the middle Miocene (~16 Ma) marks the last time that CO2 concentrations were consistently higher than at present; Greenland was not yet glaciated at that time, and independent estimates suggest that sea level was some 50 m higher than today.

They don't say "that's where we're heading". But that's where we seem to be heading, or beyond. People are saying it, but the people who are saying it are not continuing their research into human futility, they are finding other things to do with what time is left. This is genuinely traumatic to those who have come to believe it, and that is why there is a great resistance to admitting how bad things are going to get, even to oneself. - and so not much is done, and we keep calm and carry on.

If we continue to act, — Mikie

I haven't noticed us acting, and nor has the climate. Not only that, but plans to act effectively are not even being talked about or put in place. Like bollocksGPT says, what individuals can do without change of policy is negligible. We are not going to stop it, and therefore we are going to suffer the consequences. We can each help a little to make it slightly less catastrophic, so inaction is not what I am suggesting, but preparing for a radical change that is coming and will be chaotic and unsurvivable for many is now my priority, and talking to people who want to live in fantasy is becoming less and less important to me.

Why do you imagine the climate can be stabilised at 2°C or 3°C? If we had been acting to change our societies economies for the last 20 years, it would have been possible, but there has been no movement away from an economy dependent on endless growth. None.

The best estimate of the climate record shows that the last time CO2 levels were at the current level, the global temperature was about 6°C higher, and sea levels were 40 m. higher. But we are still adding more CO2 at near record amounts, so that seems a likely climate scenario for the future, on the way to possibly higher temperatures. It is the biosphere that tends to stabilise the climate, and the biosphere cannot cope well with rapid change, plus we are busily polluting and depleting it already.

The weakness of reason is apparent in this thread; one can spend pages trying to convince one fairly educated and thoughtful person that there is a problem. Half the world is going to be dead before any real action is taken. It all sounds extravagant and shocking, and most will dismiss it. But if you read the graphs, it is clear enough. We are in overshoot.

Sounds like a load of bullshit to where you can't admit a double standard due to your fear of Jewish supremacy labeling you a certain way. — Vaskane

Sounds like psychobabble and ad homs in place of any interesting insight. I am quite content to be labelled by people with agendas on either side, and my anonymous internet bravery is positively troll-worthy. :grin:

7. **Optimism and Practicality**: Acknowledge that while it's a huge challenge, being proactive and optimistic is more constructive than feeling hopeless or denying the problem. — BollocksGPT

That has been tried.

and tried.

And now it is too late. Governments have met and done very little; people have spend their lives trying to protect environments and failed.

No one wants to hear the news, but the human population is going to crash, with immense suffering and the collapse of governments. Optimism is entirely inappropriate. An entirely different mindset is required, of mourning, resignation, and stoical compassion. It is time to consider what there is of value in our civilisation that we might be able to rescue some remnant of, for the future. Chat GPT will not be high on my list. It sounds like Eddy the ship's computer, when Marvin the paranoid android would be more useful and appropriate.

Speaking of Douglas Adams, here is a little irony of the programme series "Last Chance to See"

The subject of the final programme was due to be the Yangtze river dolphin; however, the species was declared extinct in 2007. Instead, he takes Fry to the Gulf of California on the eastern side of the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico to search for the endangered blue whale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Chance_to_See_(TV_series)

As to quantum weirdness, it may turn out that causation as we experience it is a statistical effect of the large scale of our experiences, and the minutiae of the world work by weirdness - superposition, entanglement, spooky action at a distance or time travel. But the result of whatever it is, is that keys tend to work locks unless they have been glued up or rusted or broken or the wrong key is used, and minds tend to exploit such regularities of the universe and call it 'causation'.

With this traditional understanding of efficient causation, however, one can then validly affirm that, “the person letting the bowling ball slip from their hands (efficiently) caused the change in the form of the cushion that lied just underneath,” for the first occurrence as (efficient) cause extends prior to the time-span of the second occurrence as effect (despite the teleology previously mentioned remaining intact—to here not address the formal and material causes which could also be argued to occur). — javra

Teleology is perfectly well accounted for if it is simply understood that the intended result is imagined in the mind. Thus it is not the effect that precedes the cause, but the imagination. I put my key in the door because I imagine it will unlock it. But the cause of my imagination is that it did so yesterday, not that it will do so today. Someone may have squirted glue into the lock.

Cause is not always prior to effect — Banno

In that case, though it presumably is. The cushion had no depression prior to the introduction of the bowling ball. Unless it did, in which case the bowling ball did not cause it. A brick lying amid the shattered glass and nothing moving, need not deceive us into imagining that the chucked brick did not cause the window to break. And we understand that an explosion is a causal sequence of reactions that cause each other very fast so as to produce a cumulative effect, which we treat as one momentary affair for convenience.

sometimes it is impossible to decide which event is the cause and which the result. — Banno

Then in such a case there is no objection being made to what I said, except that sometimes it is impossible to see things clearly.

The priority is acknowledged in the very search for a first cause and not a first effect. But it is a mistaken search because it looks beyond the realm of causation for a cause of causation. Or else it attempts to derive a feature of existence from the logic of talk, an even more erroneous effort. Kant tried, but Hume rules!

I guess the Armenians aren't out here flaming down people with the Anti-Armenian League propaganda. — Vaskane

Yes indeed. Successful genocides are quickly forgotten, because history is written by the winners. And this is a thread about Gaza today. I have forgotten the Armenians, because the language has forgotten them. You would cause a deal of confusion, — and god knows there is enough already — if you started to try and talk about The Genocide, and insisting it was something that happened elsewhere and to other people than the places and peoples we are discussing. This is called "context". In a discussion of Armenian history, it would be entirely appropriate, here it is an irrelevant and confusing dispute.

And now i am bored already, so carry on at your pleasure.

But you completely discount the event in which it was coined The Genocide of Armenians which Armenians still refer to it as "the Genocide." — Vaskane

Yes, I discount it, because even to the extent that it is in common parlance as you speak it it is qualified as "of Armenians", it does not rule out that there may have been other genocides of other peoples. Every people think of themselves as 'The People'. My parents talked about The War; their parents talked about The Great War, to distinguish it from the little difficulty with the nazis, that my parents called "The War"

Define something however you want to fit your case, man. — schopenhauer1

No, man. I do not define something however I want, and I have not really made a case for anything except the allowance of common usage in this thread. I think you must be confusing me with the international court or something. Rather it is you who are trying to change the definitions. I observed that there is a futile argument over the mere words, and sought to resolve it. I wasn't even addressing you particularly.

Now when it comes to "open air prison", that is an emotive and unclear term, that may have some legitimacy in describing the feelings that some, maybe many Palestinians have about their situation - that they cannot get out, and cannot work to improve their situation. But it is not a clear or exact description of anything, and probably not very useful therefore to a political or philosophical discussion.

I see you skipped this post, which I believe the strongest against your case:

Would it be "off topic" if by comparing them it might reveal that the definition becomes too wide? — schopenhauer1

Too wide for your narrow mind? It seems to function s a legal definition. I am objecting to the ruling out of language in common use — can you explain your objection to my objection?

Those are your rules for word usage. Not mine. — Vaskane

They're not rules of mine, but my understanding of polite careful speech. You say what you like and the site owner will let you know what his rules are. My writ does not run here, I merely opine.

Possibly. But it would be off topic to discuss them all here. But Note the magic word "intent". This is why attention to the rhetoric of the belligerents is important. One can look for both a disregard in practice between combatants and civilians and a corresponding disregard in political rhetoric. But it is a legitimate suggestion whenever there is widespread conflict and large civilian casualties.

Whatever rules you have for your restrictions on language are your our rules that don't mean much to me. I'll continue to use the word to describe the Palestinian situation if I wish. — Vaskane

You can talk gobbledegook if you like, as far as I'm concerned mate; I'm describing common usage and objecting to those who wish to rule it out of bounds.