Language is shared, and cannot be privatised. The thread is all about claiming the right to join the community of communicators while repudiating any responsibility or commitment to said community to put any value on honest and truthful communication. A special word has been coined for the proper community response to this immoral and illegitimate move — "de-platforming". In olden days we used to call it "sending to Coventry" presumably because Coventry was unspeakably awful. No one can, or should even try, to have a serious discourse with one who does not commit to making sense and speaking the truth as far as they are able.

This means, unfortunately that political discussion can no longer be had with most politicians in public.

Why would anyone bother to do nothing with words?

Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live.
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And their posts are hard to forgive.

And a boat.

The bad news is that if some bits of the world are going to get colder but overall its going to get warmer, the bits that get warmer are going to get a good deal warmer than the "average". And whether it gets hotter or colder, trees cannot stock up on thermal clothing or bottled water, and forests can only move a matter of meters per year under their own steam.

I believe in Money, and his prophet, Trump.

These are the end times, when the disciples of Money will end poverty forever by slaughtering the the massed armies of the poor who are even now starting to sweep up from the South to invade our lands and rape our children. Only the few loyal worshippers will survive, to be caught up by the Great Penis Extension and transported to the Great Marketplace in the Sky, there to serve Bezos forever.

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything. — G.K.Chesterton

Or to put it another way, one's life must have a centre; something must have more importance to a person than other things. Rather than tedious bickering about mere existence of a being with the name we have learned to give it, consider, when things fall apart, what you will seek to preserve? Some habit or understanding or relation to the world that is the last thing you will surrender.

Call that your god, or by some other name as you please.

On the one hand:—

Reanalysis products indicate that the present-day AMOC is on route to tipping.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189

And on the other hand:—

Our results indicate that, by neglecting calving-front retreat, current consensus estimates of ice-sheet mass balance4,9 have underestimated recent mass loss from Greenland by as much as 20%. The mass loss we report has had minimal direct impact on global sea level but is sufficient to affect ocean circulation and the distribution of heat energy around the globe

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06863-2

A case of 'Many hands make light stop working.'

Perhaps it would be helpful to turn things around for a moment and ask, 'what would have to occur for nature to disobey laws?' Miracles? Magic? One difficulty would be that if folk were able to turn water into wine on a regular basis, we might come to see it as a lawful natural talent, rather than disobedient nature. On the other hand, if it only happened the one time, we might simply deny the event.

So, you think Entropy is a causal force, — Gnomon

No. "because" not "by cause". An explanation is not a cause of anything except, occasionally, understanding.

Women defecate too? But they're so pretty. — Hanover

If women were pretty, there would not be the huge beauty industry to which every woman in the world ever pays homage every day. This is esoteric knowledge revealed here in public for the first time: women are disgusting.

This is a case of becoming hypnotised by superficial appendages.

Every complex member of the fauna is fundamentally a worm, consisting of mouth, stomach, gut, and anus. The addition of systems of discrimination (senses), self-protection (exo/endo-skeletons), movement and manipulation (limbs, fins, tentacles, claws) are all little extras that serve to feed and hide the essential inner worm.

Would you agree that the average cosmic-trend-to-date has always been toward more local complexity (dust >> stars >> galaxies >> Earth), despite increasing general entropy {see image below}. If so, the topical question could be rephrased as : why do physical systems tend to follow a middle-of-the-road course, toward more & more order, as they evolve? Moreover, why is the cosmos now in a moderate state of Entropy, which allows Life & Mind to emerge? — Gnomon

I think the scientific presumption is that demons do not exist. If they did exist, they would be just the entities to impose laws on particles like political economists such that wealth/energy would accumulate rather than dissipate.

But I would say, in disagreement with the above
"the average cosmic-trend-to-date has always been toward more local complexity (dust >> stars >> galaxies >> Earth), despite because increasing general entropy. The complex ordering that is life is an eddy in the energy dissipation stream of the sun. and in no way contradicts entropic flow.

As to why we live in that peculiar condition that allows life to exist - that is a question too fatuous to respond to.

Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress. — Gnomon

This is Hegel's "geist", disguised in pseudoscientific language. He, and you, may well be right. I certainly agree that the scientific view cannot account for everything, because it resolutely excludes the subject from consideration. But I at least, cannot not pretend that a hypothetical metaphysical aspect of reality that results in "progress" and implies a goal, is science. The great advantage of Hegel's version to my mind is that the direction it establishes is towards freedom - that is to the transcendence of the limitations of physical law as that goal. Thus for example, nature evolves heavier than air flight, and intelligence does the same thing faster and more extensively for flightless apes. And the science side of this is that life does it by exploiting exactly those chaotic complex situations where a butterfly's wing or a neuron's firing can have a disproportionate effect on the world.

the key part.

To what extent these regularities are a function of our cognitive apparatus or are in nature itself, I'm not sure we can say. Our physics and science are incomplete and our philosophical understandings of what humans bring to observation and the concomitant construction of what we call reality, are also partial.
— Tom Storm — Tom Storm

The way you tell it is almost as if our cognitive apparatus is unnatural, or supernatural.

That's the first type of law, not the second type. — flannel jesus

Then you need to answer the question that I refuse; what makes nature obey the second kind of law?

Also Euclidian geometry is good for builders of Parthenons and aqueducts etc.

Perhaps I'm misreading your words, I feel like they leave a lot of room for interpretation there. — flannel jesus

Of course there is. Science is a big topic and hard to speak of globally. But it is an old cliché that scientific laws are descriptive and not prescriptive, and this means that they are the laws because nature obeys them, rather than that nature obeys them because they are the laws. Is this not clear to you?

None of the above should be taken to deny teleology, purpose and meaning or god in the world. It should be taken to deny it all in science.

you said there's no laws, only regression to the mean, — flannel jesus

This is what you said that I said. But it isn't what I said. I am not so dogmatic.

I do not pretend to be competent to speak about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, so I leave all that to others. but my position on mathematics is that it is the study of order and disorder, and thus of pattern and arrangement and symmetry. whatever there would be, would have some arrangement or other partial or complete, and perfect disorder has the structure of no structure and gives rise touch things as regression to the mean as soon as it is sampled or observed. I am a mathematical realist in the sense that mathematics deals with any possible or indeed any impossible world whatsoever, and that is why it finds 'unreasonable' application in this world. Naturally, the tendency is for humans to interest themselves particularly in the kind of maths that is instantiated in their world, and be less concerned with N dimensional hyperbolic manifolds and klein bottles and transfinite arithmetic etc.

But it would seem to me that, even if we're a little bit wrong, there's still *some underlying reason*. And I call that underlying reason a law. — flannel jesus

Call it what you like. But if, having discovered this law-like behaviour you then ask why the universe obeys this law, I cannot see that you can possibly come up with an underlying reason for your underlying reason. And this is why I call the op's question malformed.

2, begging the question of a Lawmaker or Regulator of Nature's "program", to direct its meandering median path, perhaps toward some future state. — Gnomon

I can't pass a beggar without leaving a bit of change. If one begins with maximal simplicity, there is nowhere to go but towards complexity. However, once complexity has evolved, it can devolve into more simple forms, and there are many examples, For instance
https://www.sciencealert.com/what-happens-when-species-evolve-backwards-the-strange-science-of-devolution.
It is fairly obvious that every feature of an organism carries an energetic cost, and so as environments change, features that no longer contribute to survival are selected against.

I'll just note also that when i talk of statistical foundations of the gas laws and suchlike I am not talking of empirical statistical laws, but of theoretical, mathematical statistical laws. That is a misleading reference you gave in this context. This is what I was talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_theory_of_gases

For the uninitiated, an ideal gas is theorised as elastic particles moving at random and bouncing off each other. Pressure as measured is the average force exerted per unit area, and temperature a measure of the average velocity.

Like, why is there attractive force between masses instead of repellant forces? — flannel jesus

Like, there is both. If you have a problem with the idea that physical laws are largely statistical, take it up with some physicists.

Well without going into everything, terminal velocity is a function of the difficulty of pushing all those molecules of air out of the way. Gravity itself is the average of the attractive force of all the masses in the vicinity.

is there a reason they average out, by chance, — flannel jesus

I think it's called "regression to the mean". If you toss a coin twice you might get heads twice, tails twice or one of each ht or one of each th. If you toss a coin a million times, you are almost certain to get within a hundred or so equal numbers of heads and tails, because 'chances are'.

I don't know if you mean that literally or not — bert1

I think I mean mainly, that the question is ill-formed, in suggesting that human ideas can dictate reality, when it is the other way round, that reality dictates and ideas must conform. But most, perhaps all of 'our laws' are statistical averages, measures of temperature, and hence melting and boiling points, and gas pressure for examples. So the nearest thing to a sensible answer would be something like: "because particles are very small and very numerous and thus things usually average out the same way by chance."

Nature does not conform to Laws.
Nature does whatever the fuck she wants, and laws have to learn to conform to her, if they know what's good for them.

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.