The evidence that belief can affect healing on a personal level is so overwhelming that it has been incorporated into science by giving the effect a name - 'the placebo effect'. If it turns out that thinking hard can make spoons bend, it will likewise become a recognised scientific fact, and given a suitable name - 'the Geller cutlery phenomenon', or whatever. Science is very open minded, and whatever can be demonstrated will be accepted.

Whenever things are consistently weird, they get renormalised. Inconsistent weirdness is dismissed.

One thing that I find odd though, is the lack of robust physicalists on the 'simulation' thread. Because if we are living in a simulation, all bets are off. The programmers can stop the program, change something and restart it. They can insert superman, or an intermittent fault to prevent the bomb exploding, or add a world teacher here and there. They can program the blindness of simulated observers to certain phenomena, or absolutely anything at all. Only those of us who have operators in the programmer's world could possibly know about such things. Funny how the old stories become believable when couched in familiar cultural language.

Just so weird. — boethius

You tried narcissist - why not upgrade to psychopath?

But props to the British for managing to find someone even more of a loose cannon than Boris. — boethius

Well thanks, but it wasn't us, and it wasn't even grassroots Conservatives, who were given the choice of madwoman of no fixed opinion, or millionaire bloody foreigner, and chose the homegrown disaster because they are majority racist.

Are you chaps having a big disagreement about the real character of "Russian identity"? Is it some kind of Jungian archetype? Is there anything remotely factual about it, apart from what people say from time to time it is? I don't get it.

National identity is nothing more than propaganda, surely. 'We' 'Brits' are 'very sad' because 'our' 'beloved Queen' has died. For fuck's sake! I've been told this 24/7 for 10 days so it must be true, and has become true because anyone can cry over a sentimental film.

Did your Mummy and Daddy not explain the facts of life to you?

The fact that there are strong, aggressive women and physically weaker, less assertive men is no evidence at all that there are not significant biological differences between men and women. — T Clark

I agree. It would be ridiculous to suggest there are no significant biological differences. What on earth made you think I suggested anything of the sort? Men almost never become pregnant.

It can't be either, if you mean by 'it' the answer to my question to you. I have already given you personal testimony that people cannot always 'obviously' distinguish the sexes. This is why they have tests in sport, and why we had a female pope. Some species do have clear markers for sex of size, or plumage or shape, but humans do not. Manboobs are generally smaller than womanboobs, but small womanboobs can be smaller than merely medium manboobs.That is to say, the boobs thing is a statistical difference. Nor does one sex have colourful plumage or horns. So we exaggerate the differences with cultural codes.

I don't think that's true. — T Clark

You are not saying anything. What is the need to differentiate the sexes by dress and hairstyle, then?

I'm saying it's because you need to know who to fight and who to fuck, and you can't always tell by size, shape, sound... If you can always tell, then there must be some other reason.

I don't think biological sexual differences are just "statistical." I think they are obvious and significant. To deny this is to ignore the evidence of your senses. — T Clark

If that were the case, there would be no need to differentiate them by artificial means such as designated clothing, hairstyles etc. In the days when I had long hair and a child in a pushchair, I was frequently mistaken for a woman from a short distance - despite the beard. Anecdotes of serious misidentifications with 'ladyboys' in foreign parts have also reached me, so I take your claim of infallibility on the subject with a deal of scepticism.

Trump claims he can declassify top secret documents just ‘by thinking about it’ — Michael

I bet he can bend spoons too, just by stroking them with his lovely little hands.

If you start with the enlightenment image of the white man as 'thinking thing', you get a physically feminised white man in relation to the physically hyper-masculine black. This results in the need for the white woman to be ultra feminine (empty-headed), to make the white man look masculine by comparison, whereas the black woman is physically the amazon. Such is Cleaver's insight, and it still rules the unconscious to a great extent.

What this means is that the question of whether gender is more so physical or mental (cultural/ brain chemical) is already racialised. It already depends on which racial stereotype is being considered, and it is usually the white one.

War is insanity. Each side accusing the other of insanity is part of the war. Can one speak of insanity sanely?

A casual glance at this forum reveals numerous questions people ask themselves and others. — Xtrix

[snip]

Therefore, is what is needed for better philosophy actually a fasting and detoxification of thought? — Xtrix

Observation, [consideration], question. Such is the structure of a thought, that invites further thought, even as it questions the value of thought. So let's think about it.

It's kind of odd, in a away, to be looking a a site like this, obscure minority place, and of course made of nothing but verbal constructions of thought, and finding significance there. One cannot know how many folk read the op and have no thought to answer the question or consider the matter; one only sees the thoughts of those others provoked to more thought.

I look through the fridge and the food cupboards, have a think and make a list of groceries, gather the necessaries money, bags, coat, and not forgetting the list, and head for the shops. Thought ends with action. That is simple, and sometimes it may end with inaction because the purse is empty, or the car won't start. and then there is the further question of how to fill the purse, or how to fix the car.

The op ends with a question, but does that question need an answer? If it needs an answer, then the answer is "No, fasting is not required, but more thought, and here is some more thought that answers the question.

If the answer were yes, there would be no replies. If the answer is yes, then our replies are foolish refusal. Is there more to said?. There's always more can be said, and probably someone will say some of it, because that is what the site is made of, but personally, do you need to think some more, or does your thought reach an end wherein is satisfied to leave this question, or another one, unanswered?

You need to read 'Soul on Ice' by Eldridge Cleaver, because there is an intersection between gender and race. The image of a man is not the image of a black man; the image of a woman is not the image of a black woman.

If one were to measure height, weight, speed, intelligence, more or less anything non-reproductive, one would find a large overlap between the sexes, that is completely ignored in favour of the competitive extremes. Culture exaggerates sexual differences where they statistically occur, and invents them everywhere else. One has to learn to conform, and one spends one's life attempting with diets, makeup, surgery, workouts, and therapy, trying to conform to other people's fantasy of otherness. It is worse in the US than most places, where women have to speak like chipmunks and look like barbie, and men have to buy one.

Again, completely untrue. — boethius

Indeed. but you are not asking about what the truth is, but what the plan is. The plan is to win - the truth is everyone loses.

If there's no answer to step 3, then it seems to me at least Ukrainian welfare is not a consideration in this plan — boethius

That seems unarguable. But it is in general the case that wars are prosecuted on the basis that:

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. — Churchill

War is always 'to the death'. There is no other plan. The welfare plan involves health and safety officers and hospitals, not tanks and bombs.

I immediately thought of this:

This song was originally written by Leon Rosselson in response to the Aberfan Disaster of 1966 in which a coalmine’s spoilheap collapsed on to a school in Aberfan, Wales, killing 116 children and 28 adults. The National Coal Board was found to have behaved negligently.

https://genius.com/Martin-carthy-palaces-of-gold-lyrics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwkg2QUo9AU

That was 1966. And this is 55 years later:

The data, based on exhaustive surveys, showed the regional spread of legacy coal tips and graded them according to the risk they present to the public from landslides, with nearly 300 of 2,456 categorised as being at “high risk”.

https://www.ft.com/content/94a08a9e-8579-4586-8940-ccd86df28ea7

All due respect etc, but I don't feel another new philosophical, moral or economic theory is required, so much as the implementation of the very basics of common decency.

The good news, though, is that wiping out most of the human population not only makes sound economic sense now that we have robotics and bespoke 3D printing and computer-controlled precision machining, but it is also the solution to almost all the environmental problems. Hurrah!

The myth: technological progress improves productivity so that everyone can have more goods and services for less time spent working.

The reality: it is no longer possible for a family to survive on a single wage, and it is becoming impossible to survive on a dual wage. Reliance on food banks and homelessness are increasing, work hours are increasing and conditions worsening.

Once one realises that promised progress is reversed, one naturally wants to reverse the reversal and return to the good old days.

The luddite was the product of exploitation, and the neo-luddite is no different. It is the culture of ruthless exploitation that is dangerous.

Speaking of tags, I'm not tagging any of you because I want you all to ignore my posts, even though I am talking about you. This is called 'dehumanising' and it makes the slaughter much easier to stomach.

There's an old tradition of thinking of society as 'the Great Man'. It's out of fashion, but it has some merit.

1) Perception : Visualising
2) Thought : Articulating
3) Realisation : Acting Out
4) Reversal : Analysing
5) Development : Inventing — I like sushi

One might extend your items from the individual to society, or at least look for analogical processes.
As I started to hint earlier, there is at least an aspect of ritual that is to do with communication. If society is the Great Man, ritual is his nervous system.

At the moment I am being bombarded with ritual to do with the death of the queen and accession of the new king. Every cell in the Great Man's body has to be informed and make an adjustment, rather like an individual adjusting to a new home or job. Even the national anthem has changed!

I go back to my earlier idea of ritual as obsession. It catches the pejorative sense of the word rather well: "We have traditions, you have customs, they have rituals." The Great Man has healthy habits, we hope, that lead to a well functioning society, -tradition is maintained when it has a function, and dropped when it no longer has one. Or, in an unhealthy society, traditions are maintained when they do not serve any useful function, like an obsessive, they no longer contribute to an ordered society, but to disorder, and we are talking now about 'empty ritual' that has no meaning, that it might have once had, equivalent to the obsessive thoughts that prevent an individual from thinking straight.

religious or solemn... — Hanover

Registering a birth is fairly solemn, conferring nationality and name; I think it would be a serious mistake to imagine that ritual is something we moderns have grown out of because we are not religious. clearly we do things that serve the same functions to do with birth marriage and death and many other things, that were the province of religious organisation and are now governmental. Baptism is a naming ritual and changing one's name by deed poll is not? That is arbitrary to the point of special pleading. Likewise a civil union has the same transformative effect on the social status of a relationship as a religious ceremony, the declarations of both parties freely made and un-coerced are required - there is a tendency to regard ritual as other people's mumbo jumbo, while our arrangements to do the same thing are entirely sensible and rational.

I think instincts are rather limited in humans to things like fear of heights, startle reactions, smiling, suckling, babbling, and a few more. They would act as a foundational repertoire of behaviours subject to modification and extension by learning.

Habits cover a huge range of stuff, bound up with what we might call 'knowledge' - reading and writing are learned and habitual, to the point of becoming unconscious and automatic - and of course they are socially imparted and given their meaning. But I suspect interpreting these marks on the screen the we way do, is not something either of us would really think of as a habit? Let alone a ritual?

But I'm not altogether clear why not. Perhaps it is that I think of ritual as a sort of language of its own, that one learns the meaning of by being embedded in a social world. One is taught to say 'please' and 'thank you' in the appropriate situations, and that is a verbal ritual and a habit, just like saying grace at mealtimes.

There seems to be a layering here, where the habitual becomes the medium of the creative at a new level, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts, because your questions are making me wonder whether there is really as much consistency in this as I thought ...

There are no winners in war. The survivors get to count their dead.

One obtains a birth certificate for a baby by means of a ritual of 'registration', which ritual confers the status of citizenship on the infant. Rituals are typically social enactments that change status and relationships.

The comparison I would make is not with ordinary habits as such, but with obsessions. Such private enactments never quite attain the status of ritual, but obsessions come closest to being enactments that are intended to change, or at least maintain some relation to the world.

One might reasonably claim that rituals are social obsessions. How many times does one have to declare ones nationality, marital status, age, and so on? The social obsession that amounts to a religion is with money. Every interaction, almost, is associated with a money ritual, that gives it extra significance and legitimacy. Without the money ritual, shopping is theft.

There's one principle I follow which may be considered harsh and it focuses on personal boundaries. I am unlikely to put my own life, my health or my housing at risk. If I lose my stability, I am of no use in any other way and recovery may be impossible. — Tom Storm

This is a fine principle for maintaining the status quo. But it cannot lead to reformation or revolution. It will not work for a soldier, who must be prepared at times to put his own health and life at risk, and it will not work for a campaigner for social change. It will not end homelessness, nor will it defeat fascism.

Perhaps the whispering guidance we hear and the moral pillars we have are connected, if not two sides of the same coin. The little things in life are important, as you suggest. We search for a light to help us see clearly to take even small steps. — 0 thru 9

There is something of a movement in psychiatry to regard hearing voices as a natural phenomenon. It is much more common than is generally supposed, because it is hidden by being stigmatised. but people experience something that the scientist will have to characterise as "their thoughts" as coming from elsewhere. But I have argued above that this is a dogma. If there can be one person in a head, why is it impossible for there to be two? Before the scientific dogma became so totalising and dominant as to declare such deviations insane, it was well understood that one would hear voices that might be devilish or angelic, and indeed the voice of conscience was understood by Catholic Christians at least, to be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.

Today we distinguish between a judicial conscience that looks back and a legislative conscience that guides future courses of action; there are a few instances of the latter in the Hebrew Bible. There conscience is not the heart but a voice, a voice that accompanies us. This notion of a voice being with us captures the con of conscience, a word that means “knowing with.” In Is 30:21, we read: “And your ears shall hear a word behind you: ‘This is the way; walk in it,’ when you would turn to the right or the left.” This voice directs our lives. Still, heart also occasionally becomes the guiding conscience that needs to be formed, as in 2 Mc 2:3: “And with other similar words he exhorted them that the law should not depart from their hearts."
https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/examining-conscience (the Jesuit Review.)

Everyman,
I will go with thee,
and be thy guide,
In thy most need
to go by thy side. — Knowledge

From: Everyman.

What was a guiding voice, knowledge, seems in modern man to have entirely possessed everyman, and insists on pain of incarceration and worse, that possession is a fantasy, and knowledge is all there is to life.

If virtue was rewarded and vice punished, it would be mere common sense to be virtuous and mere folly to be otherwise. Sometimes the price of virtue is very high, and you risk your life for the sake of another. I think you are exactly right to liken this situation to the Nazis; this man has no value to bureaucracy and nor do you. The social rules are lethally callous to you both, and resistance carries a very great cost. To take that risk would be heroic, and to abandon the poor man, totally understandable. I can add nothing to your moral understanding, and only wish you and him well, whatever you decide to do.

how do I confirm the diagnosis, what's the best course of treatment, how do I monitor the Earth, as it ages, does Earth become prone to specific kinds of illnesses? — Agent Smith

We do love our analogies don't we? Well doctor, when the patient has his hands round your neck and his foot on your testicles, the treatment I would recommend is a fast improvement in bedside manners.

In a bit of cybernetic serendipity, this appeared on my facebook feed today.

Kusters’ goal is not merely to relate the biographical fact that a careful study of Husserl led to an involuntary hospitalization (as in, “I was studying Husserl one day, and then things got a bit out of hand, and then the ambulance arrived”). Rather, it is to demonstrate to the reader precisely how the study of Husserl’s writings on time can precipitate a psychotic episode.

The problem has to do with Husserl’s reckless use of water metaphors, the most pertinent being the stream. Time consciousness, Husserl tells us, is like a flowing stream, with its facets of retention and protention smuggled into the present moment. But now that Husserl has opened the door to the casual use of water metaphors, what stops us from having a bit of fun, and deploying other metaphors? If we were careful and thorough in this procedure, we would likely alter the temporal structure of experience. Instead of a lazy stream, why not experience time as a raging river, which accelerates and decelerates unpredictably? Or a gentle pond which allows you to move effortlessly in any direction? Or for that matter, a whirlpool, where past and future merge and where one is violently wrenched out of a shared reality? How can anybody read Husserl thoughtfully and carefully and stay sane?

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-philosophy-of-madness-the-experience-of-psychotic-thinking/?fbclid=IwAR0TVFzVE16sEycawhBK6FDUdv9FL30fGK50_SC1CmRFKTWU8cozB4EOqEg

We can add to the metaphor, the converging of streams into rivers and the diverging into deltas, and the eventual discharge into the sea. We can add evaporation, and freezing, underground rivers, ocean flows ... 'there's someone in my head, and it's not me.'

What I mean is that madness itself has a history, as Foucault surmised: it is like a species, or an organism. Its history is internal to it. Madness changes in its inmost character from generation to generation. Any attempt to describe madness is, as a consequence, necessarily partial and incomplete, for it chases after a moving target. And this is as it should be, for this historically mutable character underwrites its oft-remarked elusive nature.

ibid.

Which makes sanity equally indescribable and a moving target.

I would pull out a story about a guy going to to the top of the mountain to seek the meaning of life and being told to stop blocking his neighbour's driveway with his car. — Cuthbert

That was my quip edited into the op, so I'll respond. Indeed one is in the world, if for anything at all, to experience the mundane. But the mundane is defined in distinction from what is not mundane but 'otherworldly', and we must as philosophers occasionally take cognisance of that too, particularly given the flow between them.

I want to say some stuff that is a bit peripheral perhaps, with half an eye on the more sceptical brethren among us, by way of trying to make a space in the universe of dialogue for the consideration of mind without some of the preconceptions that would stifle what might prove an interesting exploration..

The Cartesian tradition -- you know the guy, 'I think therefore I am' and coordinate geometry - the foundation of knowledge and science man -- that tradition takes human identity as the certain foundation, the objective atom that is the observer. According to the tradition, it is impossible and unthinkable that my thoughts are not my own, that my mind might be haunted or even possessed by other beings. People who experience themselves as permeable to otherness in these ways are declared to be deluded - because it is impossible.

We know there are such people, and we deny the validity of their experience. This is the scientific psychological tradition and to even question it is to make one's own sanity questionable.

Still, one can see some curious phenomena playing out in history on various scales that are difficult to explain. There are waves of mass movement of people where what was unthinkable becomes not only thinkable, but doable and completely natural. The enlightenment itself was one such mass movement of mind; the transformation of Germany in the 1930's is another; The hippy movement in the late 60's another. The facts are these; that multitudes change their minds quite radically quite quickly, and yet we want to claim that their thoughts are entirely their own, even the crazies who do not think so.

We have recourse to mechanical explanations - memes, conditioning, and so on, but mechanical explanations themselves call into question the existence of the unitary observer that constitutes the scientist's viewpoint.

The old fashioned fudge of the psychoanalysts is the divided self, unconscious of its division, but the effect on the observer is the same in the end - the observer cannot be trusted. And so we arrive at postmodernism, often characterised by its detractors as 'anti-science ant anti-truth. And woke.

What has woke dudes, and what is asleep? Is you is, or is you ain't?

Very nicely put. Much appreciated! — 0 thru 9

Well thanks. If we are somewhat talking about the same thing, it is not a topic I would normally discuss here in public, because it is necessarily personal and particular and not susceptible to analysis or repeatable experiment. But I can support something Jung said, to the effect that if you start noticing coincidences -'synchronicities', he calls them, it is an indication that you are heading in the right direction. Of course saying something like this is an invitation to go looking for them, which is not going in the right direction, but chasing one's own tail.

But Jung wrote far too much about everything for anyone with a life to read more than exerts - There's a nice little story by Mervyn Peake, Mr Pye, you might like...

It's as if, behind a veil, a whisper suggests, there is some particular business you have in this time and place. Play nice ethics are fine for the mundane business of rubbing along, but perhaps you have a job to do for yourself or for another; creative or healing, for a moment or a lifetime.

It is a dangerous thought if one indulges it. But danger is nothing special either. Is one ever guided to give guidance? By whom? A friend.

If it is so, it will happen whether you chase it or flee from it, because it it comes from within.

Sorry, no reference at all It just seemed obvious that if there is a largest number, decimal iterations must end at it - one cannot have the largest-number-plus-one-th decimal place. Thus no irrational numbers, Or to put it another way, the number of points on the number line between 0 and 1 will be finite.

But indeed so much would have to change that I cannot see how the numbers game would survive - most numbers would have no square for example, and calculations would keep ending in ERROR like on early calculators.

How to Do Things With Words by J.L. Austin.
According to this philopher: A statement is performative when nothing is stated or described but an act is performed. — javi2541997

All ye lovers and worshippers of Sophia, take notice that there are other gods. As you look down from your temples, you see Psyche, Ego, Mars, and Venus, your muses and your fates, and imagine them your servants not your gods. You think Poseidon is tamed; you think yourselves, indeed, above Sophia herself. To stand above the gods is a precarious place to dream oneself. Beware!

Isn’t it sad how far one has to go as a climate denier? — Xtrix

In sadness, one is reduced to psychology.

It's a matter of identification. Just as folk will die for 'their country', so they will die for their way of life, their car, their tv dinner. In claiming that my way of life is going to destroy us all, you are attacking and insulting me and 'The American Way'. Therefore you must be part of a communist conspiracy.

So you're an instrumentalist, a pragmatist, a non-realist?

I hate to be picky, but there is no demonstration of anything there
— unenlightened

And you are a skeptic? — spirit-salamander

You can call me whatever you like, I am not hot on -ismic identification, I am describing why I think some things are science and others are not. 'Pragmatist' would maybe be a good label for the position I am describing. But I am not a scientist, so I am not talking about myself. If we were talking about values or human society, or psychology, or God, I would be saying very different kinds of things, but if you wonder about the world heating up, you cannot beat a good thermometer.

Would you say then that something cannot be valid concerning the ontological interpretations of Newton's formulas? Because the principle of the sufficient ground must still be accepted? — spirit-salamander

I would say that validity pertains to argument, not to demonstration. If you want to send a rocket to the moon, or fire a shell at your enemy, or construct a pendulum for your clock, Newton's formula will help you to hit the target. That is a claim you can test or not, it is not an argument.

Maybe it's not magic: — spirit-salamander

I hate to be picky, but there is no demonstration of anything there, only a vague theory, that does not have any particular implications that could be tested and demonstrated. If it was so tested and could be so demonstrated, then it would be science. Until then, it's waffle. Scientists can and do have all sorts of strange ideas, but only those they can demonstrate are accepted by their fellows, however clever their arguments.

the arguments against the very ancient tradition of astrology were exceedingly weak. — spirit-salamander

Science does not proceed by argument, but by demonstration. The very idea of a universal force of attraction that acts at a distance is quite ridiculous; but Newton demonstrated that his gravitational calculations worked. Science is convincing because the magic works. Astrology is unconvincing because the magic does not work.

Thanks for that. I was wondering what he had to say about fascism, as the negation of democracy; this seems to be the book for that.

During the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century, American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey argued that the greatest threat to democracy was not a political regime or even an aggressive foreign power but rather a set of dispositions or attitudes. Though not fascist in and of themselves, these habits of thought—rugged individualism and ideological nationalism—lay the foundation for fascism.

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Dewey_for_a_New_Age_of_Fascism.html?id=_HlUzQEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Review:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341736937_Review_of_Nathan_Crick%27s_Dewey_for_a_New_Age_of_Fascism_Teaching_Democratic_Habits

And then I saw this 1948 article: https://www.nytimes.com/1948/10/26/archives/president-likens-dewey-to-hitler-as-fascists-tool-says-when-bigots.html

Looks like the same nonsense runs like a tapeworm through history.