No path led from the magical religiosity of the non-intellectual classes of Asia to a rational, methodical control of life. — Max Weber, Sociology of Religion

You have to laugh, surely, at such hubristic naivety? And written just after WW1, that fine exemplar of rational methodical control —not.

A thermostat controls the temperature by allowing it to fluctuate between limits. Where is the thermostat of humanity, and whose hand is upon it? Poor Max is clearly in the thrall of his own magic if he thinks it is a human hand.

It's partly the way you're interpreting events. We naturally look for repetition, so we highlight the similarities between now and the 1930s, using words like "mirroring.". This view is melancholic per Kierkegaard. — frank

Magic is something maybe only seen from the outside. In which case, it's hard to identify if it's magic, because you sort of have to know how it works "from the inside" too. In which case it's no longer magical, so how do you spot the spell if it's lost its potency? — Moliere

Let's not psychologise, let's philosophise.

That it's partly the way I'm interpreting events is partly the way you're interpreting events. Interesting that you have recourse to the medieval humours to understand me.

My interpretation of the notion of "magical powers", is that it is an 'undue' influence, a misleading, or distortion precisely of my interpretation of the world. Folks may recall my threads on psychology as just such a systematic misleading tool. Every experiment begins with misdirection in order to prevent the natural human response of compliance with the other's wishes, or its opposite. The main successes being in the field of advertising and brainwashing; this has now reached the level of seriously interfering with elections by tailored posts based on individual data for example. Other techniques might include 'love-bombing' for example used by cults and others to recruit. There might be talk of memes here too.

So much for the secular magicians.

But we are already haunted by our selves. Billions of people all haunted by the way they interpret events, all seeing the magic from the outside, or not seeing it because it is inside. I was brought up with "The Bomb". It was the new thing in the world, to be accommodated by psyche; by pretty much everyone in the world. "When you hear the alarm, crouch under your desk, put your head between your knees, and kiss your arse goodbye." It was transformative, this new destructive power, and more shocking even than the revelation of the depths of human depravity exposed in the deliberate mass starvation in Russia, and the Final Solution in Europe. This is my interpretation of events: we haunt ourselves. The secular magicians are playing with forces they cannot comprehend because they cannot comprehend themselves.

So how to philosophise the forces that guide philosophy? First, breathe.
Now let us speak as equals round a campfire in the dark, of stories we have heard of faraway places and forgotten monsters, and the wonder of the stars, and the brevity of life.

And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way. — Trent Reznor, Hurt

Yeah, about that. Are you sure Trump, Boris, Berlusconi and friends are in charge? — Banno

I didn't have you down as a conspiracy theorist. If that counts as an explanation at all, it's less convincing than the demonic tides in the collective unconscious theory.

People are stupid. — Banno

It doesn't really work for me. Are you saying that Trump is sufficiently plausible, convincing, a clever manipulator of people? He doesn't look that good to me, that he is the explanation of his own success. It's the same with our Boris; he's fucking turnip, always has been and always will be, and rarely makes enough sense to even achieve falsehood. If people are stupid why aren't the smart people in charge?

Do you have a decent explanation for how such transparent bullshitters (Trump, Boris, Berlusconi, etc) manage to convince enough people to gain power? And the synchronicity ,of their arising, that mirrors the rise of fascism around the world in the 30s?

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. — Karl Marx

Ok Karl, you da man. But what is the mechanism that determines it to be so?

Anyone?

So what’s the ethical or moral consideration of breaking a bloody egg ? — invicta

It's a reference to the cliche that the ends justify the means, analogised as "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." But to answer your question directly, it would be wrong of me to break an egg on your head to humiliate you, but perfectly fine to do so (with your permission), to condition your hair as part of a beauty treatment.

That every egg is sacred is not part of my personal ethics, though I am, as it happens a vegetarian by habit. :love:

Ends are ideas, means are behaviour.

My behaviour is to break eggs, with the end in mind to make an omelette.

But eventually, my end is achieved (or not) and becomes perhaps a means to a new end - breakfast in bed with my wife.

The law already has cognisance of this in the notion of mens-rea, or criminal intent, which is a necessary component of the crime of murder, but not in the same way of manslaughter, which requires only a criminal disregard for foreseeable outcomes of behaviour.

So I think if you keep clear that ends are ideas, and means are behaviour, your separation will work. But you need I think to give priority to behaviour, as the law does – eggs are broken, someone has died. The intention is important but the act is crucial. My diary entry where I plan the murder is important evidence of my criminal intent, but only if I at least attempted to carry out the plan.

To be open to understanding is to be open to misunderstanding; apologies for reading too much between the lines. One more word before I wake up to the real world:

To be possessed of reason is a great gift, but to be possessed by reason is to suffer a life-long tyranny.

How do I know that someone is enchanted? How does one learn the linguistic expression of enchantment? What does it connect up with? With the expression of bodily sensations? Do we ask someone what he feels in his breast and facial muscles in order to find out whether he is feeling enjoyment? But does that mean that there aren't any sensations after all which often return when one is enjoying music? Certainly not. (In some places he is near weeping, and he feels it in his throat.) A poem makes an impression on us as we read it. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology 2

―

I tend to experience romantic love more like being hit on the head with a mallet, causing brain damage, madness, and aberrant behaviour — Jamal

Your experience is only half the romance: it takes two to tango. Alas my instruction to breathe came too late. The whole point is the mutuality of relationships of understanding.

What you describe is what magicians call 'possession' and psychiatrists call 'obsession'. Not entertaining or accommodating an idea in your mind, but the idea taking over your mind. Trump is such a magician. Magicians recite their spells without for a moment entertaining them, so they work on others and not themselves. @Banno calls it "bullshit" which is a defensive warding counter-spell, whose effect is very limited because it lacks poetic power.

Are you saying that we cannot be unenchanted, but that we can be enchanted well, genuine understanding and romantic love being the models we should look to? — Jamal

I'm saying that magic is part of everyday life, and we are well advised to recognise how it works. I am saying that it works best on those who deny it.

A note on understanding.

(For your own comfort and safety, please breathe between paragraphs.)

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. — Aristotle

To reach an understanding is to find a mutual accommodation. Therefore, to understand something or someone, one requires some vacancy of mind together with the ability to reach out with empathy to the thing or person.

For example:– you read this post, and to understand it, you have to entertain the ideas it presents, and consider the significance for your other significant understandings of believing them. If your mind is too full of other stuff you won't have room to entertain a new thought

We all love to be entertained, and to entertain. Entertainment distracts the mind from its own conflicts and confusions.

And some of us have reached an understanding with a significant other. This is the enchantment of romantic love - a mutual accommodation.

The enchantment to beware is the one sided accommodation where the ideas of others find a home in you, but you find no home in them. Heroes and idols, one sided love affairs manipulations. Beware especially the one-sided media that disguise themselves as poly-vocal; the chat show, the discussion, and do not mistake a claim to be unbiased as any kind of accommodation.

A uniform is an enchantment. One puts on the accoutrements of a nurse, or the police, or a soldier, or a bank robber, and one becomes that identity; one behaves and is treated in a different way, as if one had special powers. One has united ones' being with the Orisha of Nursing, and one really has healing and comforting hands, and one speaks with the comforting authority of the healer.

You talking about me‽ — Jamal

If the pointed hat with the big D on it fits :monkey: ... I am actually in battle with the huge army that serves under the banner of "The Enlightenment", as anyone who pays attention to my posts will be aware.

Surely the most dangerous and potent enchantment is the one that induces the belief in the person that they are not enchanted and are immune from enchantment and the enchantment does not exist? Such blind and absolute faith in oneself makes one open to every horror See for example Stalin. Or here look for "I'm not affected by ads"

The thought that springs to my mind is the G K Chesterton quote, 'When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything. — Wayfarer

I fear I may have enchanted you. My profound apologies.

Under the influence of scientific assumptions, not only the psyche but the individual man and, indeed, all individual events whatsoever suffer a levelling down and a process of blurring that distorts the picture of reality into a conceptual average. We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect of the statistical world-picture: it thrusts aside the individual in favour of anonymous units that pile up into mass formations…As a social unit he has lost his individuality and become a mere abstract number in the bureau of statistics. He can only play the role of an interchangeable unit of infinitesimal importance. — Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

https://academyofideas.com/2017/06/carl-jung-spiritual-problem-modern-individual/

"We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect..." the dreadful locution of self-exaggeration:–
'we'. Even Jung could not bear the helpless inadequacy of the modern individual.

If you scratch around in Jung, you will come across hints that the zeitgeist can manifest the archetypes in proportion to the totality of their denial. Think here of the rise of fascism, or the civil rights/hippy revolution of the sixties. Understand these archetypes as Orisha, Greek god, or meme according to your religion. Try to allow a little accommodation to the next wave of irrationality that will no doubt pour over us.

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

...the more I learned about Yoruba religion the more I realised that that was just another interpretation of the world, another encapsulation of man's conceiving of himself and his position in the universe; and that all these religions are just metaphors for the strategy of man coping with the vast unknown.
[...]
...the corpus of Ifa is constantly reinforced and augmented, even from the history of other religions with whom Ifa comes into contact. You have Ifa verses which deal with Islam, you have Ifa verses that deal with Christianity. Yoruba religion attunes itself and accommodates the unknown very easily; unlike Islam, because they know: they did not see this in the Koran - therefore it does not exist.
[...]
The Roman Catholics until today they do not cope with the experience and the reality of abortion! They just shut the wall firmly against it. — Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka in Conversation with Ulli Beier on Yoruba Religion. 1992

Well I think one can find the same kind of rigidity on these boards very easily. There is no science of morality, or subjectivity, or aesthetics or value, therefore these things do not exist. And no doubt there will be those here who will disdain to learn anything of, let alone from, the 'primitive' religions of Africa.

I blame Nietzsche.

more balanced discussions — Benkei

On one side, there is a lesson to learn that the world needs a coordinated response, if containment is to be effective, and any quarantine measures or zoning needs to be globally instituted, and enforced.

But against any such measures we have the danger of suppressing debate in order to achieve that coordination, particularly when global companies with friends in high places have financial interests that might override their, ahem, natural humanitarian concerns.

A post-moral world is a post-truth world, and in a post truth world there is no trust or honour, so in the end no lesson can be learned at all. Next time, it will probably be much worse, and the response more fragmented and self-serving than ever. "Let's forget about it" follows from the inability to take what is said by politicians or medics as honest and truthful.

I'll walk you out in the morning dew, my honey; I guess it doesn't matter, anyway. — Bonnie Dobson via The Grateful Dead

By your argument a citizen in this society would be free by fact of not having to make a choice what model car to buy. — invicta

That's right. As it is, the poor chap must choose between various compromises between fast, safe, comfortable, reliable and affordable. One buys a car and then one is stuck with it. One minute of freedom and years of tyranny? And why does one want a car? - it promises the freedom of the road, apparently, but it does not deliver.

Why do you value this choice? It is a fake, because whatever you choose, the car has already been made, not to your specification but to someone else's. The one you want does not exist, and you could not afford it if it did.

Do you feel deprived that there is only one voltage of mains electricity available? Of course not; it is a boon, because all your devices will work anywhere. You don't have to think about it until you travel abroad. And that is freedom.

Nobody needs a choice of 100 different brands of factory made biscuits. It's oppressive and a burden. Have one of my home made biscuits, and next week, I'll make some different ones. The freedom of the consumer's choice is a fake freedom that produces the opposite, addiction.

I don't see any talk about making non-mask wearing compulsory. — Isaac

Not since the ban the burkha thing.

The general venal awfulness and total incompetence of the UK government has been rather a theme in my general posting here for some time. The idiotic waste of the expertise and resources of the NHS track and trace system already in place for sexually transmitted diseases, and the emptying of hospitals of elderly patients back into the care homes that were supposed to be ring-fenced were just the beginning. But the problem is bigger than that. There needed to be a global response, and there was none. Containment isolation and eradication could have worked in the early stages, but there's no point in half the world containing and eradicating. So we had the unedifying scramble for vaccines, and let it rip amongst the poor.

We vote for self-serving politicians because they represent us, unfortunately. The bald monkeys are throwing their shit at each other as usual.

Non-choices are completely different to choices. Imagine choice being two forks in a road and non-choice just a straight road.

The question of free will then only applies when we come to that fork in the road.

Objections to the bit in bold ? — invicta

Yes, objection. Choice is always conflict, and conflict is the end of freedom.

It is always will that is supposed to be free, but my experience is the opposite. Freedom for me is pottering about in the garden doing the next job that comes along, not choosing, not deciding or thinking, but responding to the situation -- weeds to the compost, weed roots into a bag to rot in the dark, stones to a bucket, litter to another bag. Tidying, tidying... Freedom is the road, not the junction; planting the seeds, not browsing the catalogue.

The junction imposes a decision, so one has to make a determination, and then one is free again.

It is clear to me that I made a choice (on creating this topic) — invicta

You made the same choice that everyone makes, to conjoin the same misbegotten pair freedom and will. Except it was not a choice. Although you could have separated them, you never considered it, because the dilemma was already formed, and the impossibility of either free will or determinism already fixed. Although your two posts at least open the possibility of a surgical separating of, not freewill and determinism, but freedom and wilfulness.

We address matters of unworkable complexity by limiting the number of factors involved and simplifying those factors further by establishing a sole purpose and importance. The criteria for what is unworkable complexity is low. To express one's self, in thinking or communication, there needs to be a concise message. Of all the points of possible relevance that could be brought up and used to reach some type of conclusion, it is not feasible to use more than a handful. — Judaka

I don't much like the this kind of use of 'we'. Let me give an example: I go to a restaurant and order a steak. I have learned from experience in restaurants that I like my steaks medium-rare. And I have learned also the sizes and rough differences between fillet, rump, and T-bone, So I order a medium-rare fillet. This simple classification system of meat cuts, no two of which are identical, has been established over time by the catering industry help ignorami like me get what we want with a little trial and error.

The chef receives the order, and sets to work with his far more sophisticated understanding, adjusting the timings and the pan heat to achieve a result that matches my expectations using his particular experience with his particular stove and pan.

Now the chef knows something about pans; he favours a pan with enough weight to maintain a good temperature when the cold meat is put in, and a composition that will conduct the heat from the stove evenly all over. So he has tried several pans before finding his favourite.

The pan is manufactured by a firm that has specialised in good cookware for many years and has metallurgists, foundry workers, research scientists, ergonomics experts and chefs, all working together to continually refine and improve the design and manufacture of their pans so they are as functional, consistent and reliable as possible.

They buy their steel from another company that ...

The beef for the restaurant comes from a butchers' that ...

The farm raises their cattle ...

The cooker ...

Government regulation and enforcement of standards, weights and measures, public health, gas safety in appliances, etc, etc.

Etc.

I rely on a whole army of people because my little brain could not even slaughter the cow or start a fire, or a hack random piece of flesh off a carcass to hold over the fire on a green stick till it had charred a bit. And that is how I deal with unworkable complexity - I get someone else to do it, who can do it better.

So 'we' (that is, me and my army) can address matters of unworkable complexity by cooperating to break down the complexity into narrow workable specialisms.

But is that like saying that since knives are used to kill, and killers are destroying their own world, knives are inherently self undermining? — frank

No it isn't. You are trying to have your cake and eat it too. It doesn't matter where you look in the environment, runaway success doesn't last because it is unbalanced. And progress is unbalanced; it is always more, and never less. You think because I argue against progress, that I am arguing against knowledge, and science, and reason. But these are the associations that you make and Pinker makes, and they are not necessary connections. One can have power and restraint, but at the moment we don't.

If you want an analogy, it is like I am saying that there is no problem with our having an understanding of Nuclear fission, if we do not use it to destroy the environment and kill each other en masse. But as we are using it in those ways, there is a problem, and progress in having even more power will not solve that problem because our addiction to power is the problem.

I agree with this assessment. What's at issue is whether progress is exclusively a threat which must be abandoned, or if it's the solution to the problems we face. — frank

No. If you agree with the assessment that progress is self-undermining, you have already abandoned the concept of progress.

I think your argument was that airplanes are the product of a diseased breed, so it's foolish to think of them as progress. — frank

I'm sorry if it wasn't clear. A species, such as Elm disease, that destroys its environment will not last long. Aeroplanes are part of the fossil fuel dependent culture that cannot long continue and will die out. Looking for Progress and her sister, Endless Growth, is a wretched mistake that leads to the cliff edge. These are not the gods we should be worshiping. Choose instead diversity, resilience, interdependence and mutuality.

I am likening humanity to a species that we call a disease, that has not established a stable relationship with its environment but undermines it. I am arguing that this undermining is what we call progress in our own case.

You overlooked the possibility that our demise might allow some other species to flourish, and therefore the airplane very well may be a stepping stone to something amazing. I think that's because you think the end of us is the end of everything. — frank

I think you have lost track of the argument.The demise of the dinosaurs made room for the age of mammals. This is not a progression but a succession.

You talk of humans as if they're the epitome of life. — frank

Do I?

So instead of developing the smelting of iron, only to lose it in the face of environmental disaster, disease, or war, we kept that skill and then went onto invent airplanes and so forth — frank

Yes. things start from almost nothing and either die out or get better. But you mention aeroplanes as if they are unequivocally progressive and not one of the things that may be heading us towards extinction. As I see it humans are making progress like Dutch Elm disease, thriving and growing and spreading until it wipes out all the Elms, and then itself.

But then, it's also undeniable that there has been progress, that there is a direction to history. — T Clark

if the starting point is the extended family/tribe, the smallest viable group, there are only extinction, stasis, or enlargement as options. If the starting point is knowledge learned in a single lifetime, there are only the same options. What some see as progress, can be equally explained as a drunkard's walk. Set a bunch of drunks on a cliff edge on a dark night, and in the morning, nearly all the survivors will have moved away from the cliff.

By the next morning, alcohol being equally available, a few more will have wandered back to the cliff and fallen, and a few will have moved further away from the cliff.

The question for the compassionate thought experimenter is whether there might not be another cliff the other side of the island that they are moving towards. It's very early days for the survival of the enlightenment.

The undeniability of progress is easily overstated, especially by those who believe they have made the most, - 'that surely cannot have been accidental?'

conservatives, of the more old-fashioned kind at least, get off the hook. — Jamal

One gets off the hook by not trying to get off the hook. This is old-fashioned:-- "We are all sinners..." Progress therefore is not made, because progress in life science entails equal progress in death science, progress in healing entails progress in sickening and torture. Individual life-expectancy has increased, but species survival expectancy has radically reduced.

Saw you, and thought of this:

Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historically fair.
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Why can't a woman be like that?
Why does every one do what the others do?
Can't a woman learn to use her head?
Why do they do everything their mothers do?
Why don't they grow up, well, like their father instead?

Why can't a woman take after a man?
Men are so pleasant, so easy to please.
Whenever you're with them, you're always at ease. — PROFESSOR HIGGINS:

"Othering" it is called; a psychological trick to justify irresponsibility and maintain complacency in the face of injustice and suffering. As if Ukrainians have been "ignoring the achievements of the Enlightenment".How primitive of them!

"what is causing galaxies to deviate from the predictions of our models?" Such causes get posited as new elements of a model a in many subfields uncovering the nature of these causes becomes a major, or the major topic of research, e.g. dark matter and dark energy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

They do, because they speak the same language we do. I'm not saying causation is denied, but what is the focus? You said it yourself - things that "deviate from the predictions of our model". Anomalies.

But in the mathematical models, there is no variable or constant 'cause' or 'effect'. Nor do the models cause the universe to obey them. The world is orderly and disorderly and mathematics describes the order and the disorder. When there is an anomaly there is work to be done revising the model, or refining the instruments. Causation drops out of the conversation because it has no function. It is not a particle, or a field, or a force, or a dimension or a measurement... It's not anything, but an old fashioned way of thinking that we still use. To look for the cause of an anomaly not understood is to look for some new thing; it is not to look for causation. Causation is a fancy word for 'the way things go' and that is why there is the temporal aspect.

No, not really. What is the cause, and what is the effect? I suppose you could say that the cause is a photon and and an atom. and the effect is no photon and an energised atom. But then the temporal aspect is there, but the thing is contrived. An interaction just seems a more natural way of thinking...

I'm getting the impression post-Newtonian physics is moving away from temporal cause and effect towards atemporal cause and effect. — ucarr

I don't know what atemporal cause and effect would be. I'm suggesting that temporal cause and effect are the 19th century paradigm of billiard ball physics which is in turn and adaptation and restriction of the notion of cause (or four kinds of cause) in Aristotle. both are not much talked about in modern physics; it's a conceptual relic of a deteriminist science.

I got excited by a small piece of pork on Saturday. — Jamal

That's got to be worth a paragraph in @Hanover's Encyclopaedia of Fetishes.

Cause and effect are kind of old physics terms. We used to talk about acceleration due to gravity, as though the word was an explanation of the observation. But Newton's laws describe the evolution of motion of objects through time and space with no reference to cause and effect.

One can say that footprints are caused by feet, or that they are caused by gravity, or both. Or one could talk about the relative hardness and resilience of feet and wet sand... But physicists talk more about interaction and the limits of interaction being the light cone. An interaction changes two things at once - an atom absorbs a photon and its energy is increased. one does not wish to say that the photon caused the increase in energy more so than the atom caused the absorption of the photon - it is a single event - a single interaction, and the observation thereof is another interaction.

Philosophers are prone to try and understand modern physics in the terms of mediaeval or even classical cosmology, and it doesn't really work. We might mention the architect's drawings as an indirect cause of the building, whereas Aristotle would suggest that the building was the final cause of the architect's plans. Physics dismisses final causes that work backwards in time, but then has to admit something like an imaginary building as the (prior) cause of the plans and thus the real building.

And then there is the matter of origins: we extrapolate the expanding observable universe backwards in time and come to a singularity, that we call the Big Bang - the beginning of space, time, and energy. And because of the physicists demand that cause must precede effect in time, there can be no cause of the beginning. The story has to stop at the limits of the equations. To speak of a cause of time and space in this sense is to reject the physicists meaning such as it is, and resort to Prime Mover type talk.

If we try to define the supernatural as that which occurs outside nature, and we then define nature as everything we can sense, then we're left with a hopeless contradiction if we say that we have sensed the supernatural. — Hanover

Just so. A physicalist has no use for the term 'natural' because everything is natural. We all know that 'Natural Yoghurt' is just yoghurt, and there is no unnatural yoghurt or supernatural yoghurt that it is better than or not as good as."Natural", in modern cosmology, is a purely emotive term expressing approval. It is a hangover from a religious age when scientists didn't know everything about everything.

unenlightened: the natural world can be defined without reference to any Gods. — Art48

Yes. It can be defined as the world.

It's the definition of "natural" that is problematic. One the face of it, the laws of nature are merely descriptive of what happens. If something happens that doesn't fit with the laws as we have found them, then we change the laws. Unless it only happens once, in which case we dismiss it as fraud, coincidence, measurement error, or imaginary.

The concept of nature is part of a philosophy that is out of favour because it proposes a triple fundamental division, Man, Nature, and God. As soon as one leg of the tripod is removed, the thing collapses. Man is unnatural, God is supernatural. That is the way theses terms have some meaning.

But when the conception is that there is no God, man is part of nature and so is everything else. The term does not have a distinct meaning at all. And from there it becomes "obvious" that everything is natural and nothing is supernatural. That nothing is supernatural is true by definition in the current cosmology.

The radical] is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed: but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side. — Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The victim of oppression is not helpless, but in need of help. But indeed help cannot come from the oppressor, rather the oppressed must liberate the oppressor.

I should lack any arguments against Yoko Ono if she tells me that a time (maybe after 200 years) will come when everyone will understand that she was the greatest poet and painter in UK of the 21st century :) — Eros1982

It happened to Van Gogh.
I don't think it'll happen to Yoko, but I don't have an argument, only a judgement.