Have you seen climate records, as read from Antarctic ice cores? They tell a story of not one but many CO2 crises that resolved themselves without any intervention at all. — Agent Smith

The fact, or rather the likelihood, that the climate will settle down to an approximate stability fairly conducive to life in a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years, is not the issue. Life goes on and will go on without humans, and you may think that a good thing.

But some of us are so myopic as to want our children and grandchildren to survive, and do not want the coming century to see a mass-extinction event of 60 -80% of species.Some of us are so limited of vision that we worry about half the major cities of the world being under water.

I don't think it is practical to build sixty meter high dams around our cities, and so it is quite important that all the land ice does not melt.


But never mind. The end of humanity is unimportant compared to the prospect of all the inconvenience of preventing it!

Ok, go on, you are not alone, but neither am I - "The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao."

Gnostics considered the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the supreme divinity in the form of mystical or esoteric insight. Many Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance, but with illusion and enlightenment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism

I would distinguish insight from knowledge thus; knowledge is the past projected into the future, whereas insight is immediate and present. One cannot share insight, but only relate it as experience from the past, so what one shares is knowledge. But knowledge can only be added to the illusion of those who lack insight - and that is the story of every religion, that the founder has spiritual insight and the followers convert it into knowledge that then becomes dogma.

I am agnostic myself. That is to say that I regard anything experienced and anything known to be aspects of the physical and thus not spiritual. This is not to deny the reality of the spiritual, because such would be a gnostic claim to know the unreality of the spiritual. Rather I would place the spiritual in that place 'whereof one cannot speak'.

Thus a particular theism, and equally, a positive atheism are gnostic positions because they make claims about the spiritual, that we agnostics deny can be known.

I don't believe the US has ever been in a position to solve the problem. It's a global, long-term problem. — Tate

That's what it means for a problem to be global; that no one group can solve it. As in a global pandemic, that could have been quickly halted by global cooperation to isolate and compensate, but only by every country working cooperatively to the same end. It didn't happen with that either. But to the extent that the US is the leading power, and the leading per capita producer of CO2, and a leading technological innovator, it does have the power to influence by example and encourage compliance with a strategy by economic means, and hugely contribute to the solution instead of hugely contributing to the failure to tackle the problem at all.

To do wrong is to cause harm. To cause harm can be measured objectively. — simplybeourselves

Objectivity is obtained by demonstration. 'Show, don't tell' - as the novelist has it.

If one believes in fair punishment, or in just war, or defends rugby or mountain-climbing, or fireworks, or surgery, then one believes in the virtue of measurable harm.

Nevertheless, I think there is a property of harm, that I suggest it cannot be valued in itself, other things being equal. One can value gambling, and the excitement of gambling lies in the possibility of losing, but one cannot value losing itself because losing means losing what is valued; and likewise, the surgeon cuts flesh, harming it in order to heal it, and cannot value causing harm for its own sake, because to harm is to destroy/reduce value. Even the vandal destroys, not because destruction can be seen as good, but because it gives him some satisfaction to have agency and power in the world. And even the curious case of the masochist, who seeks out pain and damage to his own flesh, is seeking not the harm that is done but the peace of mind and release that the harm brings to him.

So one can say in general that values are subjective in the sense that they arise in subjects, but that they are nevertheless potentially universal in the sense that subjects themselves have a common nature, that necessarily values health over harm, truth over falsehood, comfort over discomfort, etc. And yet, as we see, this fundamental necessity leaves plenty of room for disagreement and internal conflict, making the particularities seem almost arbitrary in the way they vary from one person to another and one culture to another. The world is unpredictable and the human world is radically unpredictable, and folks can make a case for lying, for torture, for war, and all manner of things that in themselves have objective negative value, but might possibly have positive consequences.

Here's a nice story of how the elephant in the cave was mistaken for a one-eyed Giant - a cyclops.

https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/birth-of-a-monster

No. Great film, but why would one bother to confine humanity in these vast self-sufficient prisons, when you can just send them to war to kill each other off?

Here is my local hydro storage facility. a grid scale mechanical battery completed in 1984 and operating ever since. If you have a couple of lakes at different levels pumping water up to the higher one stores the energy. The grid can be maintained with a variety of energy storage systems along with a good diversity of generation systems. Tidal is intermittent but reliable for instance. It's all perfectly doable with some adjustment of lifestyle, particularly in single use, planned obsolescence, and private travel facilities.

It doesn't happen because the all too visible hand of the wealthy rules, and automation has reached the point that the economic value of a peasant is now negative. Therefore it is the human population that is in line for recycling first, and then the green revolution will be much easier and will largely take care of itself.

if you murder, you ought to murder gently — Pfhorrest

May I suggest:

1. Murder is an act of violence.
2. Gentlness is the negation/absence of violence.
3. Gentle murder is a contradiction in terms.
4. ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet

I started this response weeks ago but never finished. — Ennui Elucidator

I appreciate the slowness, and the response.

but there feels to be an essential difference - that the content of my stage is not the content of your stage (identity). — Ennui Elucidator

Yes indeed. My illusion is this: when I am hit I feel that it hurts, but when you are hit it is merely distasteful to me. I call it an illusion, as if I can see past it, but in reality I cannot. The difference feels essential to me as it does to you, and it is indeed the essence of our separate identities. Without that difference we would actually be the same person, and that is why I call it anillusion of identity; it is our essence, and yet it is merely a matter of perspective and the limitations of our senses.

Rather, it seems the existentialist wants us to be who we are rather than conform to an image of who I am, in accord with a role with such-and-such responsibilities and privileges. — Moliere

Yeah, I specified self-image rather than social image, but point taken.

Or, being who they aren't? funny thing here -- if who we are is what we do, then whatever we do we are who we are, but there is the theme of authenticity -- we can be ourselves authentically or inauthentically. For Heidegger he seemed to contrast authenticity with everydayness or being busy. — Moliere

I think it is a contradiction, how could one be what one already was: viz, the authentic coward and greedy arsehole, or whatever. Let alone attain to it as the philosopher's stricture on moral probity. But it is not to be wondered at that what one ought to be and do is in contradiction to what one is and does.

if we include Levinas, then I'd say he actually manages to escape the charge of selfishness or individuality, given that we only come to know ourselves as ethical beings within the face-to-face relationship of the Other. — Moliere

This makes more sense to me too. I would talk of dependency on the M(other) as in "Be good for Mummy", and from this the ethical being arises as the internalised conflict, because what is good for Mummy is not necessarily good for me, but must become good for me, if I know what's good for me.

So the question is, whether there is an authentic-self in the resolution of the ethical conflict, and I think Paul and Jesus and Krishnamurti are saying "mu". Found this piece of paranoia in my inbox today:

You should never be here too much; be so far away that they can’t find you, they can’t get at you to shape, to mold. Be so far away, like the mountains, like the unpolluted air; be so far away that you have no parents, no relations, no family, no country; be so far away that you don’t know even where you are. Don’t let them find you; don’t come into contact with them too closely. Keep far away where even you can’t find yourself; keep a distance which can never be crossed over; keep a passage open always through which no one can come. Don’t shut the door for there is no door, only an open, endless passage; if you shut any door, they will be very close to you, then you are lost. Keep far away where their breath can’t reach you and their breath travels very far and very deeply; don’t get contaminated by them, by their word, by their gesture, by their great knowledge; they have great knowledge but be far away from them where even you cannot find yourself.

For they are waiting for you, at every corner, in every house to shape you, to mold you, to tear you to pieces and then put you together in their own image. Their gods, the little ones and the big ones, are the images of themselves, carved by their own mind or by their own hands. They are waiting for you, the churchman and the Communist, the believer and the non-believer, for they are both the same; they think they are different but they are not for they both brainwash you, till you are of them, till you repeat their words, till you worship their saints, the ancient and the recent; they have armies for their gods and for their countries and they are experts in killing. Keep far away but they are waiting for you, the educator and the businessman; one trains you for the others to conform to the demands of their society, which is a deadly thing;* they will make you into a scientist, into an engineer, into an expert of almost anything from cooking to architecture to philosophy. — Krishnamurti's Notebook

Yet also "You only exist in relationship".

I am in a relationship of conflict or negation or otherness with what I ought to be, and that creates the limit of self that identifies it. Therefore, when I am what I ought to be - authentically - there is no more division and I am the world in relation to itself.

You will always have to live with yourself. — Moliere

Find out what it means to die - not physically, that's inevitable - but to die to everything that is known, to die to your family, to your attachments, to all the things that you have accumulated, the known, the known pleasures, the known fears. Die to that every minute and you will see what it means to die so that the mind is made fresh, young, and therefore innocent, so that there is incarnation not in a next life, but the next day. — Krishnamurti

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. — John 12: 24

I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! — 1 Corinthians 15: 31

The existentialist is resigned to the prison of self, and seeks to make himself as comfortable as possible within the image he has of himself - that is the ethical life. Whereas the religious is determined to escape to that state of being wherein one can: ...

Love and do what you want. If you stop talking, you will stop talking with love; if you shout, you will shout with love; if you correct, you will correct with love. — Augustine

I wish you harm, I wish you to suffer and die. It is the necessary position of the pro-natalist, of the Creator or the procreator. It is the price of life that we all must pay, and obviously, no one ever gets a choice because it is not a marketplace, and no choice is possible prior to existence.I did not choose to bring into existence an ungrateful miserablist, but I don't get a choice about who I procreate either.
So my wishes are nothing personal; I want suffering and dying to continue in general and indefinitely, because the joy and beauty of life is not separate from suffering and death. The antinatalists will get their wish in time and my wishes will be frustrated, which is only fair. Such is life eh?

It seems to me phenomenalism is unarguably true. — Art48

Alas it seems unarguably false to me, but I have spent my working life not looking at trees so much as cutting them down, chopping them up into logs, and laboriously grubbing up the stumps and roots.

I think you need to add some physicality and action to the senses, and probably to your life; one comes to know a tree by climbing it, pulling off some leaves, falling out of it. The tree responds to my putting my weight on a branch by bending, perhaps breaking - with a snap if the branch is rotten, or else with a greenstick fracture. Watch out for splinters!

Eyes are not just for seeing, but for wiping and rubbing, and if you doubt the materiality of vision, just press a little harder, and the pain will convince you. Try to live on illustrations of food and drink, and you will discover the vital difference between the phenomenal representation in the mind and the visceral manifestation in the gut.

The longest film project Warhol worked on was the series of Screen Tests he made of various artists, celebrities, collaborators, or whoever happened to walk in the door of his studio. In front of the camera, the subject was told to sit still, not blink; often they disobeyed. Together, the series serves as a kind of mission statement—a celebration of the destruction of high-low hierarchies, placing Susan Sontag next to Edie Sedgwick, Duchamp next to Taylor Mead.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/andy-warhol-films-1387729

Or for a DIY version, take a long look in the mirror, and see if you can work out how you are feeling from the expression on your face.

There's no point in asking
You'll get no reply
Oh just remember I don't decide
I got no reason it's all too much
You'll always find us
Out to lunch
Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty
We're vacant
Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty
Vacant.
and we don't care. — Pretty Vacant - Sex Pistols

There's always an extravagance to zombies, don't you think? They always over-act.

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?"