It's all about original sin. Whether you Adam and Eve it or not, ever since, fig leaves have been de rigueur. It is mandated to hide the crucial aspect of one's social identity. And yet it is also mandated to display it in coded form. You must not see my penis, but you must see my top-hat and tails.

The reason Sub-Saharan Africans were enslaved and Arabs, Indians, etc were not, is the shameless nakedness of the latter 'proved' that they were less than human. we should not pretend that we are beyond such things, when the whole organisation of society right down to toilet facilities rests on such primitive notions.

There is a natural disgust for human waste - cattle also avoid eating around their own droppings. this is extended to menstrual fluids, and becomes gendered such that self-disgust and its projection onto the world is a particular female proclivity. See also for example, trypophobia.

The interweaving of instinct, social conditioning, and individual variability all contribute to the establishment of personal identity. We are coyly pretending that we are talking generally about all kinds of identity, but we all know somewhere, that what matters in any encounter with otherness, is to accurately identify the range of appropriate responses. Here you come, and shall I run from you, fight you, fuck you or eat you? Or some combination of these? Knowing the difference between a legitimate MD and a quack, or between a policeman and a postman is also potentially useful, but a minor, secondary question.

There are primal fears, and fundamental taboos in play in this discussion. The careful exposure of these to the insight of all participants is the prerequisite for anything approaching a rational or philosophical analysis.

Failing that, we are, alas, reduced to mere politics.

I find sometimes that the only way to have a sensible conversation is by talking to myself. Random elements are always a good way to start a conversation, and generally one will find in whatever arbitrary stimulus a connection with whatever is on one's mind. Rorschach ink blots, tarot cards, I Ching, and the Bible have all been well used for such purposes. But I would caution that occasionally one should also engage with other mortals to inoculate one's wisdom against the folly of the world.

It's a community. It doesn't matter too much if I am wasting my time; it is multiply more serious If I am wasting everyone's time. The community knows and understands more than any individual member, and a good part of the enjoyment is finding bits and pieces of wisdom from disparate fields brought into relationship in the discussions of others. The best threads for me are always the ones I am not competent to participate in.

Do not try to constrain being with words. Constrain your words rather to what is.

Well to get the op's 'name the fallacy' bit out of the way, it's a very old and all too common fallacy of "refusing to agree".

My suggestion is that mathematics is the study of abstract arrangement, such that absolutely any world comes under its purview. So neither is its effectiveness unreasonable, nor is it an invention of the mind. I mean fancy inventing that there are 17 wallpaper patterns. It's just untidy! Of course if we lived in a world where wallpaper was not a thing because geometry was different or whatever, we may not have been interested to find out about wallpaper patterns, but then some other 'construct' would become relevant, and that would be 'unreasonably effective.'

If you are, I disagree. — T Clark

Tell me more; disagreement excites me.

Mathematical descriptions are capable of describing the world because they have an ontological status in the world; ie the world is mathematical in itself. If this weren't the case, mathematical descriptions would be useless. — Hallucinogen

What sort of world would it be, if mathematical descriptions did not apply? Mathematics can cope with analogue or digital, perfect order or total chaos and anything between, any number of dimensions including fractional numbers of dimensions, different geometries... and I don't doubt that new mathematics can and will be invented to describe more outlandish worlds than have yet been imagined.

Let X be a world indescribable mathematically, - only God could begin to conceive such a thing. :wink:

But it's not a problem for me — universeness

Clearly not. And if you do not have a problem, I can offer no solution.

I leave the judgement of who is nefarious and who fights the nefarious to others such as yourself. — universeness

Yes, once you have removed all the differences, it is impossible to make a judgement.

And yet you do make a judgement, as do I. but my judgement is that some acts are bad; violence, torture, rape, deception, you know the usual stuff. And because good people do not do bad things, bad people have the advantage of being able to be good when it suits them and bad when it suits them more. Now sometimes one has to choose the lesser of two evils, and sometimes we can disagree about such complexities. Nevertheless, the imbalance remains; indeed it has to remain in order for there to be a moral order. If evil was always punished and good was always rewarded, then being good would be mere common-sense and evil would be silly. That is why the religious rewards and punishments were always located "elsewhere".

But your problem is that you are trying to incorporate a moral framework into a crude scientism, and failing to do it, and then just inventing the frankly contradictory notion that good triumphs over evil on that material, self-interest level. Wishful thinking, I'm afraid.

By the way, WW2 was not about saving the Jews, because the final solution was not implemented until later, nor to stop fascism, which was already in place in Spain well before 1939. Fascist parties were alive and well in the UK and The US and doubtless elsewhere, and were at the least well tolerated by the governments. It was a power struggle, not a crusade. The system of mass starvation in concentration camps, used so successfully by the British in South Africa, only became the icon of evil when used by Johnny Foreigner.

The 'good' people are perfectly capable of being as devious as the nefarious, if they have to. — universeness

Then they are no different from bad people. If there is no difference in behaviour, what is the difference? Is it a matter of belief? Innate superiority? Or are you just saying that good people are people who don't oppose me and my team?

Do we know anything about aliens? — Tom Storm

They're illegal, I think.

can you think of any cases where the ship would not be considered the same ship? — tomatohorse

When the ship was discovered, it was at first thought to be the ship of Theseus, but tree-ring analysis and carbon dating unequivocally showed that it was of a later date, and a mere replica of the original.

Philosophers hate vagueness and 'it depends' answers, and that's why these questions trouble them so much. So your obviously correct analysis will irritate rather than satisfy. Well done!

It's unfortunate your species has disappointed you to such an extent Vera. But, I have to accept, that you do hold the opinon, that the power of the nefarious, will always have the upper hand over the powers of good. But, I think you are totally wrong in that assessment. — universeness

That is odd. It seems quite undeniable that the power of the good is reduced by moral scruples and the nefarious have more options available; if it were not so, there would be no difference between them. One can point to the cyber wars where security is always playing catch-up to hackers, for example. Or if you want to be mathematical about things, game theory demonstrates that in many cases of the "prisoner's dilemma" sort, virtue (as cooperation) cannot succeed against vice.

I would say that science has great value, and can study values as human attributes. But it cannot produce values of itself, but relies on values of truth and honesty and openness, and so on, that people have as social beings, in order to function. These values are not demonstrated by science, but presumed. The 'success' of science might recommend these values to pragmatists, but that is also not part of the scientific project; such recommendations might equally come from pop-stars or monks or successful psychopaths.

pretty sure I just heard some crabs (yes crabs) talking on a beach as i walked past them... — Changeling

Happens all the time, but the conversation is usually rather dull :

"Hey look what a big claw I've got!"
"Pah! Mine's bigger!"
"What the fuck is that? Looks like a walking coral, hope it's the vegetarian kind, or we're paste."

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" — Moliere

If {If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,} then we cannot possibly know whether or not lions can talk.

which can help one adaptively discern how to live. — 180 Proof

Sure it can. Rather too often though, it doesn't; hence the maladaptive policies being followed in the age of the triumph of science and the decline of religion.

It shows us how to think about science, maybe. So what?

Have you looked at the op's project? I would have thought we'd be about on the same side of rejecting it out of hand.

Neither can "religion", which has only ever told us how to tribally conform, servilely obey & scapegoat. — 180 Proof

That is telling us how to live. You may tell a different tale. I certainly do. Science is silent on the matter.

You cant love if you are dead! — universeness

You claim! But have heard the Grateful Dead.

Does an image, directly from science, such as 'pale blue dot,' not have any affect on your personal views on how you should live and does it not impact your view of how others should live? — universeness

Having an effect is one thing, but that dot cannot tell me whether to build more rockets or grow more beans. It can show me the dot, but not measure the beauty.

Science wins because the magic works. Making wine from grape juice works; making wine from water does not.

But notoriously, science cannot tell us how to live, only expand our options. Who you gonna call?

The book being promoted here attempts to make a religion of science, and necessarily fails. Just as one cannot fix a broken heart with a spanner, or even a scalpel. The right tool for that job is love, and the science of love is a disaster worse than any quackery, because you cannot have it, you cannot test it, you cannot repeat it, all you can do is kill it.

brains pre-date language — Moliere

Brain expands the repertoire of an organism's responses to the environment, particularly in cooperation with specialised organs of sense. One way a complex brain can do this is by modelling the result of various responses, in a virtual environment, and for this it can be useful to distinguish things - a chestnut tree from a monkey puzzle, for instance - (trees I can climb from trees I cannot climb).

Some brains get caught up in the modelling process to the extent that they lose the distinction between the model and reality. In particular, they mistake the 'I' of the model for the real organism. Such is the human condition and universal delusion.

↪unenlightened
Long, drawn-out fart noise. — frank

↪Tzeentch
Long, drawn out fart noise. — frank

Yes, Frank. Repetitive, rude, and yet in the end, meaningless.

People cannot work together without a boss wielding power is your position, and it is indefensible, because most people most of the time just do get on with things cooperatively. Languages actually thrive better without a boss. Science itself rejects the boss in favour of open and equal discourse. In the case of environmental degradation and global warming it is absolutely the bosses of industry and government who are refusing to act while people all around are calling for action and trying to do their bit, and this in the face of a massive propaganda campaign trying to minimise climate change and ridicule and delegitimise any protest or demand for change.

Here you go. Draw your own conclusions.

Why do you see this as a good thing? — frank

Why do you ask?

Has there ever been a national political figure who was universally accepted as a natural leader of Europe? — Olivier5

To Europe's great credit, there has not; neither Hitler not Jesus managed it. It has always found other ways to reach an approximate consensus - war, usually.

Why lie about who we are? Why become something we are not? — Shawn

On the practical side, there are obvious reasons why one might want to become fluent in French, or a qualified electrician, or a hit with the ladies. Such becoming capable takes time, but can be realised eventually -- or sometimes not.

But for a liar to become honest, for a violent man to become peaceful, for a selfish man to become unselfish, these things cannot be done with time, gradually. It takes a flash of insight, and there is an instant transformation, or there is not.

What tends to happen in self-observation is that one is divided into the observer and the observed, the critic or analyser and the criticised or analysed. Suppose for example I smoke, and I am wanting to be a non-smoker. The wannabe non-smoker looks critically at the smoker and demands an effort to stop. This can last up to three hours, until the smoker's desire to smoke reasserts itself. Because the wannabe non-smoker is actually the smoker - the one who wants to stop wants to continue. And so I go about saying "I'm trying to give up, but it's very hard.", and thinking that in time it will be easier, like speaking French. But insight is seeing without the separation, that one's desire to stop has always been imaginary to the extent that it has always been separated from one's desire to smoke. Once that conflict sees itself whole, it will be instantly resolved. If one wants not to do something, one simply stops and there is no difficulty, effort, or time involved. It takes a few days for the nicotine in the body to disperse, but stopping has already happened.

Spotting the conflict can be tricky: I want to be a concert pianist/rock and roll guitar-god, but I don't want to spend 10,000 hours training my eyes to read music and my hands to play it. That cannot be.

You OK there, Un? — Banno

That entirely depends on your neural network.

I prefer "stuff" to "matter", and I prefer "arrangement" to "pattern" because a pile of sand is matter arranged in no particular pattern, and light and X rays and such is something, but not quite matter to my mind. And when pressed, I will try to squeeze in "process" as a sequence of patterns.

As to the existence of patterns without matter as 'potential arrangements' or what have you, you can please yourselves as to their 'existence'. Certainly mathematics studies such beasts in the abstract, whether they exist or not.

If philosophy hobbyists can’t even get climate science right, they’re simply not worth the time. — Mikie

What else do you have planned before myopia extinguishes our species? It is rather sad, certainly that even amongst these intelligent friends, it is a struggle all the day long just to establish that there is something to be concerned about. Of course in relation to recent posts, one has to understand that Canada is one place that might become more hospitable to human life with Global warming. And that is the myopia once again, as if all the migrants from the tropics, the floodplains, the expanding deserts and ecological disaster zones won't be bothering all the nice Canadians at all.

I used to be interested in Ecosophy back in the day, but those were the days when philosophy departments in Universities were being defunded because they could not show the value of their product. Well you get what you pay for, I suppose. You pay peanuts, you get snake oil.

Anyway, the problem remains that even now, the only appeal that anyone can even understand is to naked self-interest. "Hey, we're all going to die. " Perhaps you and I are the stupid apes that cannot see that that must be a good thing for the poor planet, and the sooner the better.

So i don't see it helping with the mind-body problem or the hard problem, except perhaps to show how what we deal with is always already filtered through our neural networks, even when they are behaving unconventionally. — Banno

When did neural network become the foundation of reality, I think it must have been last night while I was asleep? I have less experience of neural networks than I have of brains, and I have only once tried to cook a pig's brain, and I regretted it. Neural networks sound stringy, and might therefore make quite good filters in principle Pig brains though would make a terrible filter - gelatinous rather than fibrous.

Poor old Sartre clearly had a bad trip, which usually arises from a resistance to the dissolution of self. Shame he had to make a philosophy out of it and impose it on us, though.

So neural networks engender visions of heaven and hell. and neural networks engender visions of neural networks that some people call filters of reality.

Heaven's net spreads wide.
Though its meshes are coarse,
Yet nothing slips through. — Lao Tzu

Whereas everything crashes through the net of hell, presumably.

How is a neural net to make a judgement here?

Which dictum you gonna believe? Is it even up to you? — Janus

One can make a decision only on the supposition that one can make a decision. If it's not up to me, or down to me, then there is no decision to be made, ever. I will be determined to sit here and piss-my pants, because I cannot decide to go to the toilet. I conclude that everyone who wills anything believes they can do so; one cannot write without choosing one's words, thus even Galen has to believe he has a choice to make that he can make and that hasn't already been made. This doesn't answer the free-will determinism question, of course, but I think it answers your question, universally. Everyone is pre-determined to believe in free-will by virtue of there being, as it were, 'forks in the road'. See also, The Diceman by Luke Rhinehart.

Psyche is disrupted by psychoactive substances, but never quite transcended. It seems to me that even a materialist or rationalist understanding can see theoretically that the sense of self is derived from the limitations of the senses; My boundaries are the eyes that I can see with, the body I can touch with and so on. I am not you because I cannot see through your eyes walk in your shoes, feel your pain and joy. Identity is thus a mere blindness and insensitivity, opposed to awareness. As if we were all flat-Earthers, we mistake the horizon for the end of the vital world

One lives one's normal life in service to that blindness, and makes awareness subservient to it. In this way one makes oneself absent from one's life, and projects oneself through time as nostalgia and fear/desire. It is thus only through the disruption of the discounted normality of awareness as self identity with drug induced sensory confusion, that one begins to become aware of reality at all. Otherwise, there is just a vague feeling of something missing, a loss of 'meaning'.
See also, The Bird of Paradise, by RD Laing. (Not seemingly available online for free).

I think I should really read Anti-Oedipus first, and I may start doing that, but I'll risk a brief description of my fantasies about the issues. Large pinches of salt all round.

I imagine sanity as mental wholeness, and that means the integration of emotion, imagination, reason, and so on.

I don't have to imagine, I clearly see society as a whole as profoundly sick, dangerously sick, addicted to violence against itself, detached from reality in all sorts of ways, behaving irrationally and incoherently, and talking nonsense.

It follows, I suppose, that the diagnosed schizophrenic manifests individually the whole of the fragmentation of society. To be sane is to be sensitive, and the sensitive among us have projected onto them, the repressed negativity of those around them, in the same way that any oppressed group does; whatever is unacceptable to me, I make that you. You are mad, because I cannot possibly be.

Here is a song about how to fit in to this fragmented society :

If it doesn't matter to you whether your views are true or not, then... but I don't believe that is the case at all. — unenlightened

I've changed my mind.

views about what is the case (information), as opposed to views about what ought to be the case (instructions, ideology), or sentiments about what is the case (emoting). — Isaac

You are of course entitled to your views about what is the case, and in particular about what ought to be the case and how you feel about these things. Is that not what we are doing here? Exchanging ideas about what is the case and what ought to be the case and how we feel about it? Please don't pretend that I am the ideologue here and you are the disinterested scientist. We are interrogating matters of fact and matters of morality together in this thread, and we assume - or at least I do - that our views are honestly held {held to be true, that is}, and open to interrogation and that we both hope that the truth will eventually prevail. And this despite your suggestion that speaking of truth is tiresome.

How ought we, as a society, deal with talk; should we regulate it at all, and if so, how? That is the topic isn't it? And I am not speaking on behalf of any kind of "ilk". I am speaking my best understanding of the problems we have in society, and how we might improve society. Don't misrepresent me as some totalitarian propagandist, please. I am an old fart long retired conversing with other thinkers on an obscure website, not an agent of the devil. I don't claim a monopoly on the truth, nor do I think that anyone else has one; I claim that we ought to care about it, and if we don't care about it and try to conserve and preserve it, it will not flourish. And that would be of great cost to society.

So I am wondering what it is that you disagree with, exactly? I does not help very much to retreat from truth to views, it does not exempt you from supporting your views in debate or make them more real or honest, let alone believable. These are my views, and they are what I think is true. If it doesn't matter to you whether your views are true or not, then... but I don't believe that is the case at all.

It has nothing to do with 'information' or unenlightened's tiresome invocation of truth. It's to do with restraining one's speech to get along with others. And, yes, some people do seem to need a little nudge in that direction sometimes.

What's new is the attempt to control the dissemination of actual information by hooking it on these already existing social rules and then pretending (as you do here) that they're one and the same thing and things have always been that way. — Isaac

When you say "actual information", it starts to sound like you mean things that are true, rather than things that are false. How tiresome of you!

Some stuff about population movements and demographics, death rates and concentration camps. Don't expect much pro Putin stuff, or even much lets negotiate stuff. But interesting nonetheless.

Also, they're taking the Hobbits to Isengard.

1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are. — Sargon

This is problematic. The argument declares for determinism in the first premise, and then discovers it at the end as if it has proved it. But of course the cause of my actions is my imagination. I imagine the pleasant taste of beer and that might cause me to head to the fridge, or I might catch sight of my burgeoning beer-gut and think again. The causal path of thought cannot be predicted even if it is mechanical because of the halting problem. So the question is begged as it always must be.

But the argument is further disguised by talk of "ultimate responsibility" as if it is something deeper than ordinary responsibility. Which it clearly isn't. I choose to drink beer and then I am drunk, and I am responsible for the way I am - drunk. And if I get in a fight or run someone down, I am responsible for that because I am responsible for the way I am. And of course the law recognises that one attains an age of responsibility, one is not born with it, but develops the capacity to change one's state. It also recognises diminished responsibility, when circumstances are overwhelming. There is a lot of work being done by that weasel word, 'ultimate', that it has no permit for.

The freedom to say anything, like the freedom to pass gas or salivate, is a condition of life, something that we do by virtue of being a human. — NOS4A2

Tape worms are a condition of life; one to be avoided. Lies are likewise parasitic on truthful communication and likewise weaken it, by destroying trust. Trust is the very fabric of society, the foundation of the economy, of investment, and of trade. The thesis of Gibbon's Decline and Fall is that the collapse of the Roman Empire was first and foremost a moral collapse. I think we are heading for a second dark age, and for the same reason.

But the magic doesn't work because no matter how many times you repeat the word, the U.S. (for example) is still not N. Korea, Nazi Germany, or Stalinist Russia. — The Baden

That's a rather low bar you're setting, and one that fabulous wealth does much to lift a country over, even if the trickle down doesn't lift all boats.