did you manage to validate your spurious claim about Aristotle? — Wayfarer

One does not validate spurious claims, one doubles down on them.

but that doesn't' then falsify those theories, if anything it provides good evidence that they're right. — Isaac

Everybody knows about clickbait. So they become somewhat immune and it has to change. In order for psychology to be a science, it needs to keep subject and object apart. That is why every experiment involves deception - as soon as the subject knows what aspect of behaviour is being investigated, their behaviour is influenced by that knowledge. But a huge part of all social behaviour in humans is dependent on what one thinks of humans - one's folk psychology, and folk psychology is influence by so-called scientific psychology. Physicists do not have this problem as atoms do not have a folk atomic theory, that influences their interactions. But I'll stop there because we are way off topic.

Banned Jackson — Xtrix

Hurrah! A tedious arrogant rude and contemptuous fool.

Providing an example shouldn't be too much trouble then. — Isaac

The theories of Freud have totally transformed public attitudes and behaviour regarding sex, from regarding a glimpse of stocking as something shocking, to anything goes. Freudian imagery has become a cliche of cinema, and what was repressed and unconscious is now trendy to the point that S&M bondage dungeons are now one the extra rooms looked for on house moving programs, along with the home office and gym.

You two have a very distorted view of the degree to which the general public read psychology papers! — Isaac

The general public read trashy women's magazines and watch tv, which are full of the latest freshly out of date psychology theory concerning losing weight, self improvement of all kinds,, and whatever the latest therapy of the stars is. It's psychology, Issac, but not as we know it. they are also moulded by clickbait which is designed by psychologists - one doesn't have to understand to be influenced.

They don't read astronomy papers either, but they know space is big and think they have been abducted by aliens in space ships. That's a new phenomenon of human behaviour.

Only the very ignorant use wiki. — Jackson

Only the wilfully ignorant don't use Wikipedia. — Confucious

"The expression “the elephant in the room” is a metaphorical idiom in English for an important or enormous topic, question, or controversial issue that is obvious or that everyone knows about but no one mentions or wants to discuss because it makes at least some of them uncomfortable ..." Wikipedia

"The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story that illustrates ontologic reasoning. It is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other." Wikipedia.

The former is a metaphor of recent coinage, and the latter is an Indian parable. Aristotle has some stuff to say about elephants, but does not use it metaphorically or in a parable as it would not have been sufficiently familiar to his audience to make a vivid image. his information would have come mainly from Alexander's rampage to India.

I wonder if anyone is interested in a different analysis of war, in which it has a psychological/religious function. This goes around the moral ideal v the realist profit. We might assume that the cost benefit of war almost never adds up either economically or morally, and examine therefore how the irrationality that is war functions at the unconscious level.

https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/ideologies/resources/marvin-ingle-blood-sacrifice-totem/

a small, nevertheless most special number like −1/12
will do just fine. — Agent Smith

But, but, but... that number arises from calculating infinite sums, and explicitly not from setting a finite limit. You cannot get to it if you set a finite limit.

The common approach is to assume that any object can be divided in any way, so there is an infinity of possible divisions for each thing to be divided. In reality though, the way an object can be divided is highly dependent on the composition of the object. — Metaphysician Undercover

I would rather say:
The mathematical approach is to assume that any object can be divided in any way, so there is an infinity of possible divisions for each thing to be divided. In physics though, the way an object can be divided is highly dependent on the composition of the object.

But the problem with setting a largest number is that it rules out irrational numbers such as pi, sq-root 2 etc because they cannot continue to infinity as decimals and therefore become expressible as ratios. Of course physicists don't care about such things, and always just fudge their calculations to get roughly the right result any way, Blah blah, experimental error, uncertainty, whatever. But mathematicians have no mercy, and maths is full of irrationality ever since Pythagoras. Irrational numbers are the devil in the detail that he proved the existence of geometrically, and the fact that mathematicians (and others) are still trying to insist that maths should be fitted within the limits of their thinking is more to do with psychology than mathematics.

You could, though, go for taxicab geometry, as long as you like your circles roughly square.

she says that our society is "toxic" and that her task as the president of the country will be to make it "healthy". — baker

So if you are so fortunate as to promote a therapist to president, it would be the madness of a toxic society to ever remove her; anyone suggesting such a thing will be in urgent need of treatment for their own good and that of society. Some toxins may need to be eliminated from the body politic, and asylums will have graveyards.

Politicians can rule the land and the body, but don't let them into your head at any price.

But what does this have to do with Lacan? — baker

Probably not a great deal, but it might have a lot more to do with psychology of any sort getting together with politics.

Mentally healthy folks think like me, and therefore the opposition is mad and needs to be locked up and given treatment until they think like me.

To be fair, no one asks a biologist to predict the next mammal that will evolve, or a neuroscientist to guess what they're thinking of using neuroimaging alone. People's expectations for economists are strangely high. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Chaps do manage to forecast the weather to an approximation, and that's a complex system. I think economics suffers from the same problem as psychology, (and politics, as you mentioned) that the theories change behaviour and so confound themselves. For example, the effect of this thread, if widely read and believed, might be to send stocks into a long term decline as long term investors diversify. Until folks get as far as this post and realise that the long term decline has been caused by a self-fulfilling prophesy rather than real events ... and so on.

I suspect every theory in the humanities is inclined to become either self-fulfilling or self-refuting as soon as it becomes public, but I wouldn't care to say which kind this one is.

Your complete guide to the chimera of UK democracy: https://www.doubledown.news/watch/2022/july/11/peter-oborne-demolishes-boris-johnsons-legacy

That's interesting. I don't see very much loss there, aside from the loss of face of the old guard of alchemy, and for poor Lavoisier, his whole head. There does seem to be a connection between the French Revolution and the Chemistry revolution though - conservatives cannot adapt and radicals are unstable - the same old story. I suppose people like to think that science is above such human frailties, and perhaps it is, when conducted by the gods.

Are you a p zombie? — hypericin

To honestly answer yes, it seems to me that one would have to examine one's interiority and experience and find nothing there. Not the nothing that one finds in one's empty pocket, but the nothing one finds in not having pockets at all. If the answer 'yes' comes to mind, it must, in all honesty, be rejected.

My friend David Hume made a little room in all our hearts for some faith, with two sceptical insights into the limits of reason, that I like to summarise thus:

1. You can't derive an 'ought' claim from an 'is' claim.
2. You can't derive a 'will be' claim from a 'has been' claim.

Some folks like to make much of 1. So much, sometimes as to deprive all 'ought' claims of any meaning.
But usually they make very little of 2. They simply claim that it is a matter of reason (and not faith at all),
to believe that the future will be like the past, often on the grounds that it always has been in the past, seemingly oblivious to the radical circularity of their "reasoning".

So I invite everyone to join my (and Hume's) irrational faith that things will be broadly as they have been and that we ought to be good.

the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of that number—and so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe.
[snip]
At the time of its introduction, it was the largest specific positive integer ever to have been used in a published mathematical proof. The number was described in the 1980 Guinness Book of World Records, adding to its popular interest. Other specific integers (such as TREE(3)) known to be far larger than Graham's number have since appeared in many serious mathematical proofs, for example in connection with Harvey Friedman's various finite forms of Kruskal's theorem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number

Don't go messing' with mathematicians with your "c'mon, be reasonable" attitude; they'll have none of it.

Computers have memory, and they identify themselves, but they have no awareness. Think of a p zombie as a perfect computer simulation of how a human behaves, without any of the internal stuff. — hypericin

Yes. There are two possibilities if such a simulation becomes possible; either they are zombies, or they have awareness. It seems to me at the moment, that although it is easy enough to mimic human behaviour in many ways, it is not really possible to mimic awareness without awareness, and that awareness is not an epiphenomenon of information processing. There is a stillness and emptiness to awareness quite different from the business of thought, that I don't think anyone has much considered trying to simulate in a computer, because it seems to have no function. Perhaps that is the secret that it has no function, but is just an epiphenomenon, but I think it has a vital function, which is to impart freedom. Zombies have no freedom.

Alexa, I love you.

https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/187/examples-of-kuhn-loss

I'll refrain from adding my ignorance to your poll, but looking at the above, the losses seem small compared to the gains, which makes sense for the greedy accumulative instincts of scientists. Just because speculators sometimes make losses, that does not entail that cumulatively, they do not make profits.

Alright, so a p-zombie would be the functional equivalent of the first since it lacks awareness. — Marchesk

Yes. A p-zombie would be like a phone, not like a partner.

"Are you awake?" the first aider asks the patient. "No." responds the patient, and the first aider is reassured.

But is it odd to say that my phone has no awareness of feeling cold when it tells me it's cold outside? I don't think so, because phones don't have sensations. — Marchesk

How does your phone know what it tells you? I imagine it does not know at all whether it is telling you it is cold outside or that happiness is a warm gun... because phones don't have sensations. But humans do, and they have arranged sensors compute and relay a weather report to you via your phone. Again the confusion between thought as the manipulation of information and awareness as presence in the world.

Oh you mean am I aware of stuff? Sure, of course, all the time when I am awake. But I never experience red - I see red flowers and postboxes and swatches on paint charts.

You are familiar with the ambiguity of 'experience'? Notice the tenses - I have or have not had an experience. It seems odd to say I am having or not having an experience. The case of alzheimers is instructive. Awareness as I call it, qualia as you want to call it or 'experiences' but no past tense experience to speak of. Your question repeats the confusion, from my point of view, of narrative self, as an identification in thought, and awareness as visceral presence in the world.

You mean qualia? Because "awareness" or "self reports" are not considered consciousness by philosophers like chalmers, since they can be defined in purely functional terms, and implemented in robots or code. It's the sensations of colors, pains, emotions that make up consciousness. And those aren't functional. — Marchesk

I can't make sense of quaila either. Never knowingly had one. Am I a zombie?

In my imaginary scenario I have the power to stipulate whatever I wish. — hypericin

You do. But I do not have the power to make sense of the philosophical zombie stipulations. It seems to me that the concept relies on a confusion of awareness with identity. Take an alzheimer's sufferer for example who might be your spouse. They may have forgotten your relationship and treat you as a stranger, but you have not, and do not. The relationship has become one-sided in this sense of identity sharing, but the person still feels joy and suffers fear and pain, just as animals do. That basic awareness should be absent while memory and identification is fully functional simply makes no sense to me.

"Alexa, what would you like for supper?"

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Wol was explaining to Piglet all about iron flow batteries to make large scale energy storage much cheaper while also using less rare metals and stuff:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1046365/grid-storage-iron-batteries-technology/

I'd prefer the thread sticking to the topic — jorndoe

Yeah, I was asking what the the topic was.The Saudi regime is is a brutal dictatorship with a cloak of piety, propped up by the West.

A witch-hunt is a synonym for unjust persecution and terrorising of a population and victimisation of any social deviance. Probably, it's an unsound legal concept,

My suspicion though is that the Conservative Party will change its rules to rapidly come up with a new leader. Tom Tugendhat or more likely Ben Wallace would be my tips.

having the UK government in crisis can't be a good thing — Wayfarer

It isn't a good thing, and it has been going on for a long time. When one cannot believe anything the government says, one literally has no government, and that has been the situation for 2 years. The pretence of government continues for another month or two...

I interpreted his post to refer to morality. — Benkei

So did I. So the question is what morally grounds the law such that the distinction between true and false grounds can be made. Are we defending the freedom of worship of witches, or what?

Witchcraft exists at least to the same extent as prayer exists. People pray, and people practice witchcraft.

The Saudi Arabian authorities occasionally execute people on false religious grounds. — jorndoe

So are you saying that all religious grounds are 'false'?
If so, what are the 'true' grounds for legal penalties?

You need to post about the current UK government if you want to see my deep abiding hatred. This is just a friendly word to the wise.

Excuse me, but someone has to be the rabid angry sneering lefty round here or we'll all drown in our own reasonableness.

Affirmative action essentially forces social change by giving minority individuals the chance to start their own dynasties. — Tate

So you define social change as social more of the same.

much of the leftist program is unappealing to most people — Domhoff

Because...

even the desperate poor prefer to think they deserve their poverty rather than that they have been systematically shafted their whole lives and never stood a chance. — unenlightened

Organised religion forbids the miserable serfs and slaves from any escape from their exploitation. Because the organisation wants to continue to exploit. Just as the shrinks used to treat attempting to escape as a mental illness (drapetomania), so the modern shrink treats the attempt to escape oppression and exploitation by suicide as a mental illness today. Any resemblance between religion and psychiatry is purely un-coincidental.

It's not racist to ask if we have arrived at the point where it can be dropped. — Tate

But I'm not talking about racism as I find it unhelpful. I am saying that states that claim to be democratic are nearly always dynastic to a great extent (count the Bushes and Kennedys, for example). This means that by design and by accident, privilege and disadvantage are passed down the generations. Such dynastic government cannot remotely be fair and equitable, and relies on custom and management of the media, from the pulpit to the tabloid and beyond, to perpetuate the dominance of a minority. (Notice that it relies also on the patriarchal control of women's sexuality, to guarantee patrilineal descent) Racism (and sexism) is an effect rather than a cause of a partisan system of government that only ever pretends to be equitable. When can we drop extra support for the structurally disadvantaged? when the structure stops systematically disadvantaging some people. Don't hold your breath.

This requires an acceptance of some sort of illuminati that sets up the puppets on the strings and then watches as they half knowingly play out their roles on stage. — Hanover

No it doesn't. It requires that people are selfish first, familial second, and tribal third, and that people in government are good at manipulating opinion.

I'm Jewish and can attest to the emphasis upon education in my community, which also leads to over-representation in the professions and in leadership positions. — Hanover

I can attest the same cultural norms amongst the UK working classes, and also among the Afro Caribbean population here. And that proves what? It proves that we are all hearing the same messages and seeing the same solutions to the same problems. 'Work hard, support power, make yourself useful to power, don't rock the boat, etc.' The Jewish community surely knows as well as any that education and hard work count for little when the government is against you.

Indeed, I don't notice a lot of Asians in the US government; they are simply pursuing their interests using the available rhetoric. The government makes the rhetorics available and promotes the agenda using Asians as their tool. A good many Asians will be familiar with thinly disguised dynastic rule from places like India. And a good many African Americans will be familiar with the uses of 'house niggers' and 'uncle Toms' to keep them in place. It's similar to the use made of Christian women to delegitimise women's rights campaigners.

It suits the dynastic rulers to promote the interests of the Asian minority as a means to maintain the oppression of the much larger African community. Do I have to convince you that The supreme court has an agenda that is not equal treatment and equal rights for all? If so I give up in despair.

(...you brought this on yoursel — Count Timothy von Icarus

And the rest of us. :cry:

Succsessful invocations surely merit a ban for witchcraft?

Even if we don't have a rigid caste system or an entrenched class system, modern societies tend to be meritocracies at best. — ssu

Modern societies tend to be like the kingdoms of yore. Politics is almost as much a family affair as the Mafia. "Meritocracy" is the cloak under which dynastic rule likes to hide, and is the justification for grinding poverty amid fabulous wealth. It is so very easy, to maintain, because even the desperate poor prefer to think they deserve their poverty rather than that they have been systematically shafted their whole lives and never stood a chance. The better off always think they deserve their privilege of course.