So, from a philsophical point of view, facing the question “What to do with evil”, I think a good answer is working on philosophy to make it dynamic, permanently self-critical and in dialogue with experience and subjectivity, avoiding conclusive answers, conceptualizations that can make us disconnected, forgetful of personal human experience. — Angelo Cannata

I see that the evil in the world is in me, and I ask what to do about the evil in me, as if what I might do is unaffected by, and separate from, the evil. In other words, I imagine myself good in operating on my evil. Reminds me of the Zen saying: "If you have a thought in your head, throw it out. If it is so persistent that you cannot throw it out, then take it out." Am I the good that is left when the evil is removed or is the good what is left when I am removed?

I understand what the Chinese Room is doing...correct me if I'm wrong. It's dispelling that the computer may SEEM like it's doing something that requires complex thought, but it isn't. — GLEN willows

The way I would put it is that thought is not consciousness, but a mechanical process of symbol manipulation that one is sometimes half conscious of, rather as I am half conscious of the kettle coming to the boil in the kitchen, but don't mistake it for the essence of consciousness.

The feeling of a moving present or `now' seems to form part of our most basic perceptions about reality. Such a present, however, is not reflected in any of our theories of the physical world. In this short note I argue for a tenseless view of time, where what we call `the present' is just an emergent secondary quality arising from the interaction of perceiving self-conscious individuals with their environment. I maintain that there is no flow of time, but just an ordered system of events.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224905185_The_nature_of_the_present

So the elimination of the present, which is what physics does, entails the elimination of 'process' in favour of "an ordered system of events" and the elimination of flow and dynamics in favour of a static world of 4 dimensions.

"the interaction of perceiving self-conscious individuals with their environment" is nothing but such a static orders system. Thus at every moment I am equally conscious, while at each moment I am located in the particular moment of time by the state of memory and imagination that constitute knowledge of past and future respectively.

Science here achieves the god's eye view from 'outside time'; it is a view shared by some mystics:

Time is the enemy of man. And that enemy has existed from the beginning of man. And we said why has man from the beginning taken a wrong turn, a wrong path - in quotes. And if so is it possible to turn man in another direction in which he can live without conflict? Because, as we said yesterday, the outer movement is also the same inner movement, there is no inner and outer. It is the same movement carried on inwardly. And if we were concerned deeply and passionately to turn man in another direction so that he doesn't live in time, but has a knowledge of the outer things. And the religions have failed; the politicians, the educators, they have all never been concerned about this. Would you agree to that?

https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/cleansing-mind-accumulation-time

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/05/15/operation-leaked-emails-intelligence-coup-boris-johnson/?fbclid=IwAR0HWxt43EWJNiPriGvmzJM9qJUjm3Bctm2QiFMxGocFxsnRz9o7H7thfWc

How they got brexit done, and why Britain has a cockwomble as prime minister.

How would you respond to the claim that “even primordial sentience needs to be innately aware of truths (conformities to what is real) in order to survive; — javra

I would say that a yeast cell, say, has no language, and no means of representation that could correspond to reality or not in a way that I would connect with the notion of true or false. It responds directly to ingest sugars and oxygen and excrete CO2. Yeast cells have direct access to reality and immediate responses.

A cat has similarly direct access to reality, but is also informed by memory and habit as well as a more complex repertoire of instinctive responses.

Here is where truth and falsehood begins:

we adopt (varieties of) 'truth-telling' in order to build trusting bonds with one other; wherein 'truth', such as it is, is mostly pragmatic — 180 Proof

Above is the story of The Monkey who cried 'Snake'. And it is surely obvious that trust is the prerequisite for untruth, not the effect of truth-telling???

But then establishing the truth of it? Some of us are still trying to establish the truth of “I am”. — javra

Very sensible. First is it true? then, (if I am), am I good? and am i beautiful? can be considered.

On what grounds – "principle" – does one "really believe" truth if "truth is the first principle"? — 180 Proof

One believes that truth is the first principle of language because otherwise it doesn't communicate, and there would e nothing to learn. Then one comes across the boy or the politician or the priest who cries wolf, and one learns scepticism. Therefore truth is prior to doubt. Mummy says the wheels on the bus go round and round, and that reveals the truth and meaning of language and the world, all day long.

Maybe, just maybe, Truth = Good = Beauty. They're the same thing?! — Agent Smith

What is = what ought to be = what is desirable?

If you can honestly say that is your experience, then I think you must be enlightened; I am unenlightened.

If truth isn't the first principle, one cannot really believe the second and third principles.

It's a long time since I read any Rollo May, I always thought of him as a decent conservative trying to understand these wild modern radicals - as personified by fellow existentialist R D Laing, for example (as quoted here).

My own view though is that what is being diagnosed here is the necessary condition of every psychological theory, for every generation. This is because one's psychological theory is the lens through which one understands and relates to, oneself and other people. As such, to a considerable extent it modifies the psyche itself, just as the particular character of one's own psyche will influence how one interprets that of others.

Thus to crudely illustrate, my parents lived at some particular time and had psychological understanding X, and in order to understand my parents and their time, and particularly their imperfections and failings, I have to take a critical view of theory X - "Well at the time people thought X and so they didn't understand ... blah blah..." This is theory Y, an obvious improvement on X. Thus the lifespan of any psychological theory is about 25 years.

Existentialism managed to escape academia to a greater extent than many other modern philosophies, largely because of the literary skill of its champions - Sartre, Camus, Iris Murdoch and others - who embedded its ideas in narratives. That's really the key to making any philosophy take root among ordinary people. But even existentialism gradually became lost once again in thickets of jargon impenetrable to all but the specialist. So it failed to become a practical social philosophy - and when it tried to become more political and mobilised, it became sucked up by the vortex of Trotskyism (in Sartre's case) and Nazism (in Heidegger's case). — Jules Evans

https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/modern-philosophies-as-therapy

Philosophies have a longer life than psychologies. But one sees in this short paragraph something of the interaction of philosophy, psychology, politics, and daily life, and how impossible it is to arrive at a complete and stable understanding of them.

How can we know that we can have hallucinations? It seems to me that we could only know that if we could distinguish hallucinations from the real. Which we do, and have to be able to do in order to get the sceptical argument started. The sceptical argument relies on our knowing the real from the hallucinatory and then declares that the distinction it is founded on cannot be made. Silly, yet somehow convincing to many.

You ain't no Robespierre, and I ain't nobility. I am a worthless philosopher, and you are a peasant.

Noblesse oblige. It is incompatible with liberty.

for all l care — Wittgenstein

Peasants do not have to care.

The UK queen devotes herself to serving the people her whole life; politicians only serve a term or two, and civil servants merely 9 to 5 weekdays, soldiers serve for a few years. Anyone who is not a servant at all is of very little value. Musicians, artists and sportsmen have a little entertainment value; philosophers are not even interesting for the most part, and invariably misleading. If you will not serve, you are a waste of space.

Anna Politkovskaya — Olivier5

Putin has publicly demonstrated many times that he basically does not understand what a discussion is. Especially a political one – according to Putin, a discussion of the inferior and the superior shouldn’t take place. And if the subordinate allows it, then he is an enemy. Putin behaves in this way not deliberately, not because he is a tyrant and despot ad natum – he was simply brought up in ways that the KGB drilled in him, and he considers this system ideal, which he has publicly stated more than once. And therefore, as soon as someone disagrees with him, Putin categorically demands "to stop the hysteria." (Hence he refuses to participate in pre-election debates, which are not in his nature, he is not capable of them, he does not know how to make a dialog. He is an exclusive monologist. According to the military model the subordinate must keep silent. A superior talks, but in the mode of a monologue, and then all the inferiors are obliged to pretend that they agree. A sort of ideological hazing, sometimes turning into physical destruction and elimination as it happened to Khodorkovsky). — Anna

This has the ring of truth. And if it is true, there is nothing to be done short of complete military defeat at any cost. It certainly makes more sense than the cries of delusion, stupidity, and pathology that are projected rather too easily in his general direction.

Having said that, I'm not sure all the contributors here understand what a discussion is either. :worry:

It may be worth asking where are the most erroneous judgments are made. — Jack Cummins

It's probably worth thinking a bit about what a judgement is and when one makes one. It looks to me that judgement is what is called for when the limits of knowledge are reached. It's associated for example in driving skill with anticipation. One judges the speed of other traffic and anticipates where they will go and where one will be in relation. In the circumstance of driving, good judgement means not maximising correct judgements but minimising rather eliminating disastrously wrong judgements. But if you are playing a taxi computer game, a few lethal accidents more or less is unimportant. Thus good judgement is something different from getting it right all the time or even most of the time. this is what I was hinting at with my previous example.

It provides very strong security. — Olivier5

It certainly seems basic common sense reinforced by current events that to be an unaligned neutral buffer state between two larger powers, is to label oneself a potential battleground. No one with any sense wants to live in No-Man's-Land between two armies - hence the name. Or you could choose to join POTATO, or whatever the Sino-Russian defensive alliance is called.

Your question calls for good judgement. The author's judgement as you report it here seems mechanistic, not good enough for you or me.

Back in the 70s, there was a campaign for natural childbirth in the UK. Women often felt that child birth was over-medicalised, that the wishes of expectant mothers were being overridden, and that obstetric interventions such as forceps delivery, caesarian sections, induced contractions, etc, were overused because they were expressions of male power in a place where the previous tradition had been for female midwives to be in charge.

The campaign had some success, and all sorts of innovations came in to re humanise childbirth and de-medicalise it; birthing pools more natural positions than lying on a bed, de- stressing the event to reduce pain and promote relaxation, and so on.

50 years on, there is a scandal in several hospitals about excess neonatal and maternal deaths, caused by an ideological commitment to natural childbirth, overriding the mother's wishes and failing to implement those same interventions of caesarians, inductions and forceps that were being overprescribed before. So it goes.

There is no recipe for avoiding both type one and type two errors, except this:

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.

The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it.

So sometimes things are ahead and sometimes they are behind;
Sometimes breathing is hard, sometimes it comes easily;
Sometimes there is strength and sometimes weakness;
Sometimes one is up and sometimes down.

Therefore the sage avoids extremes, excesses, and complacency. — Lao Tau - 29

1. Essential properties - These are properties which are absolutely necessary to the word. A tree is a plant.
2. Accidental properties - Properties that the definition can contain, but are not essential to its identity. "A tree can have branches". — Philosophim

These trees have roots and branches, but are not plants. https://medium.com/@gp_pulipaka/an-essential-guide-to-classification-and-regression-trees-in-r-language-4ced657d176b

Are there trees without branches? — Benj96

Palm trees tend not to have branches.

Then there are tree ferns, tree heathers, tree peonies, etc.

In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are usable as lumber or plants above a specified height. In wider definitions, the taller palms, tree ferns, bananas, and bamboos are also trees.

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

It is a fact, that even within botany, 'tree' is not strictly defined. Some philosophers will attempt to impose a definition, and complain when folk use the word differently or point out difficulties. But the rest of us know that where the boundary of the word is is unimportant except when it becomes important and that's when a specification is appropriate. I have some birch trees in my garden that are less than an inch tall. I am growing them from seed.They are dwarfed by the heather - a shrub with the structure and woody stem and branches of a tree. But they will catch up.

In engineering, a plant is machinery. In politics, a plant is something else again.

#55. https://shwep.net/podcast/naomi-janowitz-on-ancient-jewish-magic/

We live in a social world of constructed meaning, and and meaning is made of ritual. This is a really good episode, that speaks to various debates we have here about knowledge as social construct, language as social construct, performativity and the intersection of race and gender with ritual and magic.
Certificates displayed on walls, passports, are objects imbued with real magical power; written incantations. There is a huge amount to think about in this episode - highly commended.

Knowledge is habit; repetition of the past.

On the contrary, it is you who misinterpreted my position. You need (1) to show that you correctly understand others before blaming them for misunderstanding your incomprehensible statements and (2) make sure that your statements are comprehensible.
— Apollodorus

As for (1) you didn’t show me that I misunderstood you before I showed you that you did misunderstand me, and repeatedly so. Therefore it’s you who needs to show me that you correctly understand me before complaining about my misunderstandings (and you didn’t show me any of my misunderstandings yet!). As for (2), I can’t make sure my statements are comprehensible to you if you conveniently chop them to build a straw man argument. — neomac

May I commend to you both the power of silence. This is too tedious to even try to understand. There are some really interesting links and points of view being drowned in this febrile proving and demonstrating and strawman burning, of what can only be conjectures of what may develop, and guiding moral principles that may or may not not be shared. Just present your best case and let the enemy do the same instead of trying to win an argument that no one can possibly make on either side. For god's sake we do not need competitive misunderstanding!

Reminds me of The Culture. Excellent books if you like Sci-fi. The end of scarcity entails the end of capitalism. Want something? Download the specs and your atomic scale 3D printer will build it for you, including building an extra large atomic scale digital printer if you want something big like a spaceship.

He says, cutting across a deal of off topic axe-grinding.

Like other British "aristocrats" at the time, his father was conveniently married to the daughter of Wall Street financier Leonard Jerome. — Apollodorus

So how many husbands did the girl have exactly, and did they all get some nookie or was it mainly a polyandrousness of convenience.

You want the State to be the sole arbiter of safety. I do not. How can we reach a moral resolution to this impasse? — NOS4A2

Health and safety needs funding and it needs coercive power. If there is some way this can be provided other than by the state I'd love to hear about it. ???

I agree that the state is in many ways just like a mafia, that is why I bring it up. However, I like to think that a democratic government is somewhat less corrupt, somewhat less arbitrarily violent than a Mafia would be in the absence of governmental opposition. I could be wrong...

But what I see happening, that I think you will probably disagree with, is that governments of nation states are losing their power to multi-national corporations, which are largely immune from government regulation. Far from fearing the strength of the state, I fear its weakness and its vulnerability to complete subversion and take over by corporations with agendas entirely at odds with those of ordinary people.

:100: But good luck convincing anyone who matters of that. Meanwhile, I fight despair with gallows humour.

In my view, people are going to have sex no matter what. — Paulm12

This is the real problem, that someone somewhere may be having fun, and not paying for it by producing another wage slave.

There was a film about it, called "If".

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1190773529/?playlistId=tt0063850&ref_=tt_pr_ov_vi

In my mind the proper role for government is to defend liberty, or to go extinct. The moral and just way to fund any institution is voluntarily, whether through subscription, donation, etc. — NOS4A2

Recipe for a Mafia. 'Voluntary' contributions to 'protection'.

But I suggest to you that market regulation is also important. For example, border control and health and safety. Thanks to https://www.caa.co.uk for example, I do not have to worry much about either getting on a plane, or a plane falling on me, because unsafe operators are banned from the country. Recently, under the influence of small government advocates, building safety regulation has been relaxed. The result is freedom for builders, and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

And that is why I for one fear laissez-faire. It results in abysmally low standards in everything, and pollution, exploitation and death. I want doctors to be regulated, electrical equipment to be safe, food to be fit for consumption and so on. I want government to deal with the mafia and the snake oil salesmen as well as protecting me from the Mongol hordes.

Shut up, Brazil, nobody care what you think. Keep the cheap coffee and cattle feed coming. And let's not talk about deforestation too much.

An electric motor and a spring, basically. The difficulty is in getting the forces balanced so that the motor operates the finger with the strength to flick the switch while also tensioning the spring enough to pull it back afterwards. If i remember I had a very small toy motor geared down with a worm thread, and a coil spring from god knows where. But you could use a spiral spring too. The finger is just mounted on an axle that makes a 1/4 turn each time, and the lid works by gravity. Wooden box -easy to fit the bits to; an old cigar box in my case with the top cut in half and hinged.

Marvin Minsky's useless machines. — Agent Smith

Back in the sixties, we had to make one of those for a physics project. The joy of liberal education!

Sure. But if some Americans firmly believe abortion is murder, that matters. Their opinion shouldn't be brushed aside in the name of someone's privacy. No one has a right to privately commit murder. — frank

If the law wishes to mandate children being brought into the world, then it seems to me that the law should also provide for the upbringing of that child, and every mother should therefore receive a reasonable living wage as employee of the state, while their child is a minor. The law forbids murder, but it has then to provide a justice system that deals with annoying people in some other way, because murder works.

I'll leave this here in case anyone is interested. It's a big pile of extemporised words and might not immediately seem on topic, but if you follow it you might get somewhere and see something.

http://legacy.jkrishnamurti.org/es/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=960&chid=664

"FBI diddit" — jorndoe

The trouble is, with the loss of political probity, no one is believable, which means that anything is believable. In the UK we have the scandal of police officers under cover getting married and having children to infiltrate animal rights groups and acting as agents provocateur - there's reason for suspicion whenever there is a term which does not exist in English, because we would never stoop so low, would we?. So you cannot trust even your spouse and parent of your children.

We have replaced the biggest dick competition with the biggest pile of horseshit competition - Trump wins there, and Boris the parody Churchill wins here. Alas, there can be no democracy without truth.

Why not go for the full transformation with hormone therapy, sperm bank and castration? Reduce all that testosterone fuelled crime, and completely end unwanted pregnancy. A small price to pay for huge social benefit. Imposing it on immigrants would do a lot to solve that problem too.Foreign tourism would be reduced, mind, unless it became a destination of choice for women...

And the reduction in population would be good for the environment.

their meddling in Russia's backyard with Europe as its forward pawn
— Tzeentch

Russia is Europe's backyard. — Olivier5

...

Nobody likes to admit they live in the shed.

I am currently convinced that organic, pasture-fed animals are environmentally neutral. — Louis

That is a bit simplistic. The issue I would put to you is one of sheer environmental acreage.

If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Now that too is a simplification, because there is some land that is unsuitable for crops, but even there, most will support forest and wilderness. Unquestionably, a mainly vegan diet as the norm, would be greatly beneficial to the environment, at least while we wait for @180 Proof to halve the population, and even beyond. Most animals are fed crops for a portion of their diet because pasture does not grow all the year round in most places, and at the moment we are still losing forest to cattle and their feed, to satisfy the increasing demand for meat

the problem is this whole black&white attitude. — Kevin Tan

I agree. There has always been a bit of a religious attitude about polluting the body with animal products. Leave the slugs in your salad for added protein, I say. :wink:

The numbers do not lie; the votes add up to 99% therefore 1% is free and undecided even amongst those who have voted. As I have often said if the world appears to be in contradiction, change your diction, because the world does what it wants.

The blind following an old blind man with a stick, mistaking it for a vision. [tries to remember that old trick of turning a stick into a snake... that was a real deepity.]

He made the poll scores add up to 101%. — Metaphysician Undercover

If even one you had been without error, the scores would have added up correctly - it was none of my doing - I didn't even participate. But wait- perhaps the world can yet be redeemed if I do:-

There! order is restored with one percent of freedom.

Philosophers have valiantly fought the tyranny of religion and tradition; but they have come under the sway of the tyranny of knowledge and become hypnotised by the tricks of science. We are ruled by arrogant certainty and it is taking us to our grave. Don't be so sure.

Jung wrote too much. Have you read Alice Miller? Her thesis is that Freud was confronted with patients suffering from traumatisation from child sexual abuse, but because he was being paid by the parents, had to dismiss their experiences as 'fantasy', and invented a whole theory of how this could be, setting the course of psychology back a century and causing untold misery. Jung didn't really get to this either, but got embroiled in the exploration of the same imaginary realm. So it goes.

Simply that the state ought to mind it’s own business — NOS4A2

What, then, is the state's business, and how can it finance itself?