Plains Indians weren't exactly matrilineal — frank

With matrilineal descent and matrilocal residences, motherhood, not fatherhood, was central to Navajo culture. The earth, agricultural fields, and sacred mountains were all called mother, as were corn and sheep. Motherhood was thus defined in terms of reproduction and the ability to sustain life. Mothers were responsible for passing along Navajo religion and traditions to their young children and sustaining them through love and care. Three of their most central mythological characters were the maternal figures Changing Woman, Spider Woman, and Salt Woman.

https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=historical-perspectives

Those not willing to do so are usually the ones more likely to actually carry out such acts — I like sushi

Yeah, that makes complete sense, probably.

1. Everything must have some explanation (PE).
2. Reality in total cannot have an explanation (PU). — lish

What's the difference between everything and reality in total?

It's a classic example of a cunning arrangement of words that a philosopher thinks can oblige reality to be or not be. I call it "magical thinking". Recite the magic formula, and the the world will do your bidding.

Why do you want to contrive a scenario that might justify torturing a baby, or any one?

If the bad man is doing bad things, the good man will try to stop him. If the good man can only stop him by becoming a bad man, then he cannot stop him at all. This is perfectly universal, that bad men are hard to stop because they will do things that good men will not. The scum always floats to the top, and the gold always sinks to the bottom. God made it this way so that bad men will not be bribed or frightened into being good. The FBI man wants to succeed at any cost, therefore he is bad, not good.

...

Fairy dust is like dark matter. The only evidence that it exists is that all our theories will be wrong unless it does. — T Clark

Well the theory that all our theories are wrong, must be wrong, because if it were right then not all our theories would be wrong. Therefore fairy dust necessarily exists.

It's a question about how fairy dust works.

So that's a 'no'.

The mind looks to the future in anticipation, and the senses look rearward at the past. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no light coming from the future, only from the past. You say 'looks' but it is not observation but imagination. The trick to anticipation is to make one's imagining realistic and realisable.

... if fairy dust were involved. — T Clark

A stone and some shards of glass leap up from the floor; the shards form into a whole pane of window glass, and the stone leaps from its centre arcing to land in the outstretched hand of a boy who pulls his hand back and lays the stone down on the ground.

How did he know to stretch out his hand just at that moment?

Propaganda, advertising, special pleading, rhetoric;

Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented.[1] Propaganda can be found in news and journalism, government, advertising, entertainment, education, and activism[2] and is often associated with material which is prepared by governments as part of war efforts, political campaigns, health campaigns, revolutionaries, big businesses, ultra-religious organizations, the media, and certain individuals such as soapboxers.

Wiki.

I certainly don't want to shut down the discussion, but point out merely that it is not limited to governments and nation states. There has long been an argument between those who claim that patriotism is a virtue and those who see it as a vice. I favour the latter view, but want to emphasise that it applies also to religions, races, genders, and any other identified and distinguished groups.

My country right or wrong.

https://www.thoughtco.com/my-country-right-or-wrong-2831839

We know at the extreme that the patriotic member of a Nazi governed country is a supporter of horrors unless she is a traitor to her government. Is there a middle ground of critical patriotism?

I'm half watching a news report of a football mach between a Saudi royal owned British club and a Russian oligarch owned British club. Fortunately for me, I have no interest in football. But I am not turning off the central heating either. There is no clean money, and no clean oil or gas. Is there clean patriotism? I say not, but only a naively innocent patriotism, that does not see its own dirt.

So Ukraine's win will result in a 'free society'? How has that in any way sidestepped the "balance of probabilities over some guesswork as to long-term consequences"? — Isaac

Well this is my understanding of a non-consequential morality. One does what is right with the understanding that it will usually fail; that no good deed ever goes unpunished. This is why what is right is different from what is expedient. Ukraine fights and probably loses, because 'better dead than red'. Or perhaps, better to die in the gas chamber than to operate the gas chamber.

Such justification needs a little more than a balance of probabilities over some guesswork as to long-term consequences. — Isaac

'Good luck with that.' he ironises. Perhaps a (non-consequential) moral principle is what you need, lacking omniscient foresight? Perhaps a free society is worth dying for, worth risking nuclear war for?

I am simple minded; I define 'forwards' as the way I am facing, my eyes being at, in, or on my face. I cannot see where I am going in time, but only where I have come from. Therefore the future is behind me and the past in front of me, and I progress backwards. "At or in?" I give not a fig. "on", why not?

M'kay. :mask:

Eyes in the back of your head is it?

Time does move backwards; or rather we move backwards through time. You can tell because we can see where we've been, but not where we're going.

Not just nationality, but every form of identification is necessarily divisive and leads to conflict. See Swift's parody of the Big-endians v the Little-endians for example. And truth is always the first casualty of every conflict.

Personally, i have to beat them off with a stick; but I don't actually hate women at all. :cool:

That's my complaint. You "consciousness" guys are bogged in the mud because you have a dys-functional conception of what its about. The mind can't make causal sense until you adopt a functional, enactive and embodied perspective. — apokrisis

Reminds me of Wittgenstein's characterisation of philosophy as "engine idling". We do philosophy to tune the engine of consciousness, but then we want to do something and go somewhere with it, and that's science or literature, or politics, or, love, or war. But alas, philosophers tend to think that philosophy is the function of the engine.

I'm super happy that you have noticed that it is at least an interesting question. I think most of us have a divided mind such that the world-and-self that is observed is not the observer, but that this division is an illusion.

I imagine God the programmer. In the beginning, God wrote the program of the world, and Ran it for a day, and was dissatisfied, So She halted the program and adjusted the parameters, and ran it again. And the morning and the evening were the 2nd day. [...] And on the 7th day, She just let it run.

This God is omnipotent in relation to Her creation, but not necessarily in relation to Her own being. She might even create an avatar, and give it super-powers and intervene in the world, appearing as a wise prophet and miracle-worker.

But to imagine that our piles of words, even most logically arranged, can oblige God to be like this or like that is magical thinking.

Because I am a qualified painter and have spent 7 yeas in a Monastery prayerfully listening to God, I happen to know that the other day he stopped time for (obviously) an indeterminate eon, while he nudged that missile away from the nuclear reactor. He quite often stops the world program to adjust things, and at least once He had to restart completely, because - well I won't go into that.

I'm inclined to with modern views on consciousness pervading the topic, but when I think about it, when I say something like "my song" when referring to a piece that I have composed, I am talking about the same emergent consciousness as I would be if I said "my thoughts." See where I'm going? It is more likely that consciousness is itself emergent in whatever capacity it is so emergent. — Garrett Travers

Whether consciousness emerges or intrudes is rather the question of the thread, and your claim that neuroscience has answered the question whilst still unclear as to what it means to be conscious has not found much favour. But My inclination would be to say that to be conscious is not merely to see, but to be aware of the seeing, and not merely to think but to be aware of thinking, not merely to act but to be aware of acting. And further, to be aware equally of not seeing and not thinking and not acting. This marks a clear distinction between consciousness and content of consciousness, which might be useful to the investigator, and answer some of those awkward questions about dreams and so on.

The emergent properties of consciousness... — Garrett Travers

Do you distinguish between consciousness and its contents?

Problem is, the collective parallel ion pulse currents in the brain don't constitute information referring to something else like in digital computers. The connection strengths between neurons can be changed due to synaps widening. — EugeneW

Firstly, Blah-blah-blah neural networks.
Secondly, it's an analogy. I am not reporting the actual thoughts of game characters.

The lesson is that within a world, everything appears to be a feature of that world, but we know in the case of digital worlds that avatars are not mere game artefacts, but take input from a human from another world. But we only know it from outside the game world. The game artifacts and avatars are not distinguishable from within. So by analogy, that there is not necessarily any detectable 'soul input', does not entail that it is all quarks and probability waves.

I have incontrovertible evidence that this thread is the product of my laptop. It appears on my screen as a result of complex processes that take place in the cpu modified by and modifying RAM and SSD. And it's just the sort of theory I would expect from a machine.


Bowser's theory of consciousness is that it is entirely digital, but Mario believes in meatspace souls that somehow inhabit or haunt the digital world and influence it.

I'm afraid Internet platforms are part of the game now, not outside of it anymore. TPF may be too small to attract attention yet, but you can bet that this "blame NATO" game is being played all over the interwebs and in traditional media as well. — Olivier5

I'm not playing it. I'm urging others here not to play it, and you are playing a feeble point scoring game against me. Don't bother.

as if the actions of the American or European states have anything to do with any any sense of cultural identification. I guess this is how fascism takes root: when people look at state actions and think: that's 'us'. — StreetlightX

Is this not the whole justification of the legitimacy of every government - that it enacts the will of the people, or at least acts in their best interests? We anarchists know it's all tosh, but then we don't try and govern.

At which point of grandmaster gamesmanship, blame is inappropriate all round. You lose the world championship - it's not a sin to be the second best player in the world.
— unenlightened

Except that apportioning blame is part of the game. — Olivier5

Yes indeed, and propaganda is part of encouraging the troops, etc. But we are not playing the game here, we are discussing the game being played.

just as you can criticize NATO for having acted in a way that provoked certain action, it should have been fairly obvious to Putin it would have done exactly as it did. If you're going to require that NATO and the EU be Grandmaster chess players in this environment and expect them to respond precisely to the strategic environment, then let's impose that same standard on Putin. — Hanover

At which point of grandmaster gamesmanship, blame is inappropriate all round. You lose the world championship - it's not a sin to be the second best player in the world.

I blame the parents.

It seems "traumatic stress" is so powerful because it forces the person to face moral quandaries for which they were not prepared for. — baker

Not moral, particularly, but quandaries, as in conflicts. So the child is dependent on the care of an adult who abuses them. that is the classic conflict in which one must remain attached to - the abuser. So the feeling of abuse must be suppressed. Likewise the fear and horror of the soldier, in PTSD.

There is the notion of 'resilience', as something that can be developed by coping with small stresses in a basically benign environment.
Because I am lazy and forgetful, I'll refer you to my old thread on the topic of trauma, where you will find more details and links:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5783/adverse-childhood-experiences/p1

https://www.opindia.com/2022/02/africans-say-they-are-facing-racial-discrimination-in-ukraine/

https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/world/article/2001438803/racism-claims-emerge-as-ukrainian-refugees-throng-poland-border

Looking forward to the denazification of Europe? War brings out the best and the worst in us. Not thrilled with the UK response to the refugees either, which amounts to 'don't even try to come here unless you are wealthy.'

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ukraine-refugees-priti-patel_uk_621b1c77e4b06e1cc5907767

It is connected with loss of competence and self-esteem. It is loss of a kind of sense-making — Joshs

I dare say it is. The loss of feeling is the loss of meaning and value. All I am saying is that it is not the situation that cannot be coped with, it's the emotion one has, which may well include loss of self esteem or even self loathing. And without ruling out predisposing factors such as genetics, epigenetics, social conditions such as patriarchy industrial and post industrial conditions, and the loss of social support networks of extended family and the increase of isolation and the promotion of individuality, it is generally the case that traumatic stress is the most usual triggering cause.

https://www.healthline.com/health/ptsd-and-depression

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/post-traumatic-stress-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20355967

https://www.psypost.org/2019/01/traumatic-stress-can-lead-to-depression-when-it-interferes-with-daily-activities-study-finds-53003

Etc.

https://psychcentral.com/depression/depression-causes#risk-factors
https://psychcentral.com/depression/trauma-and-depression

Or perhaps depression is the emptiness of the situation itself rather than a secondary response to it. It would be the feeling of the failure to cope rather than a further act of cutting oneself off. — Joshs

I'm not sure what you mean. One cuts oneself off from ones's own feelings - an internal psychological splitting.

I don't think a situation one cannot cope with would be empty. ??

But is being depressed or even anxious the human default? — TiredThinker

Anxiety is a response to stress. Stress is psychological conflict. Thus if one is in a car trying to go somewhere, but one is stuck in traffic, one wants to move but cannot move. Modern life is very stressful and the best relief for stress and anxiety is exercise.

Depression is a response to trauma. Trauma is any event that produces an overwhelming negative emotion, pain, fear, humiliation, abandonment, stress anxiety, that sort of thing. The mind, unable to cope with and process the feelings encountered cuts itself off from the feeling. Unfortunately, it does not merely cut off one negative feeling but all feelings. Life becomes empty, but with a sort of residual dread of the unprocessed traumatic feeling.

you haven't really read through the thread, have you? — Joe Mello

Yes I have. Your accusation is false.

Even you came to this thread and looked at me instead of the principle. — Joe Mello

On the contrary, both you and your principle are right there in the thread title. And I have addressed both.

Are you backing off from your claim that love is the greatest? You do not engage, sir. You do not respond. I ask again, where in all this long thread is your love? It appears from your posting that your god is miserable self-obsessed bully incapable of a friendly engagement. If the God that is love has been with you and speaking to you, why are we not feeling it but only your arrogance and contempt?

Where is the love, Joe? All your hard work and lengthy training and deep contemplation has produced an abrasive, impatient, unkind, and arrogant persona. Where in this thread is there a kind word or even a respectful word for anyone here. There is no love in you, and there is therefore no value in what you say or in all your cleverness.

Another way to guarantee you don't understand what's going on is to believe politicians on any side.

Try this heresy for size: the project in invading Ukraine is to force The West to undermine its own economy and any semblance of unity by imposing sanctions that will hurt it far more than Russia. Meanwhile, China will buy US and European assets at depression prices and provide such sanction busting as may be required, along with Pakistan, et al.

I hear much talk of sovereignty and democracy, but I smell oil and gas, and disaster profiteering. I fear governments are becoming irrelevant, and multi-nationals run the show.

co-operation in pursuit of mutual benefit, which is an element of Capitalism? — Garrett Travers

Co ops and Mutuals? No, mate, that's socialism. That's the stuff Margret Thatcher was concerned to privatise. Remember it well.

So for years you have been humiliating this person by waiting for them to abase themselves by asking for your charity and then giving it as though it was nothing to you when it was vital to them.

And now the boot is on the other foot and you will not humble yourself by asking for help.

Sorry, what was the question, again? Human nature?