what if the UK gets proportional representation? — The Opposite

I'll still be disillusioned.

If you have a company that chops down trees and sells the wood, you are likely to make a lot of money, and the government will want lots of tax. so you add on another business that plants trees and doesn't sell anything, and that loses money and reduces the tax bill.

Similarly, if the government want to remain popular while ripping everyone off, they need a second party that people can vote for when they get fed up with being ripped off, that will rip them off even more. It's called 'democracy', and it's a very smart wheeze.

The Tories have always stood for greed and selfishness, and most people most of the time are greedy and selfish. So they mostly win. The labour party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tories, that functions as a political equivalent of a tax loss.

In the sentence "the cat is on the mat", "is" seems to function as a grammatical placeholder. We feel deprived if there is no verb, so we invent a verb of inactivity to hold the place in a sentence without any action the way zero holds the place where there are no tens or units or whatever.

1. The cat is sitting on the mat.
2. The cat on the mat is sitting.
3. The sitting cat is on the mat.
4. The cat is on the mat, sitting.
5. The cat sitting on the mat is ...

And this grammatical function is becoming confused with the relation between object and idea.

An architect makes plans of a house that does not exist. Sometimes his idea of a house is realised, and sometimes not, according to the whim of the planning dept. Architects are haunted by invisible incorporeal buildings - that's the job. Humans are driven by ideas that they try to realise; they dig and sow they build, they forage they form governments; they live always haunted by demons that do not exist. The chef is haunted by his menu, the carpenter by her furniture drawings, the tailor by her jacket pattern; everyone is busy realising their ideas as best they can. everyone is haunted by what is not, {yet}.

In that sense, one can ask about the "cause" of time - meaning a reductive scientific account or a metaphysical ground, for example. — SophistiCat

One can do lots of things by way of speculative talk especially if one can retreat when pressed to 'loose' or 'metaphorical' or 'metaphysical'. Nevertheless, an 'account' has to add up, and the time before time does not compute.

Asking for the cause of the universe is asking why inflation happened — Michael

Is it? Do you agree that a cause must precede its effect? If so, what meaning do you give to a cause of time? Something preceding time seems to make no sense to me. One speaks of 'outside' or 'beyond' time and space in a hand-waving loose way, but I think cause is rather too definite for your 'why' to substitute without scientific complaints. A cause of time and space, necessarily outside time and space, is not the same kind of cause that science wots of.

Time is logically prior to causation.

Causation is a time-bound concept such that causes always precede their effect in time. Thus there can be no cause of time. It follows that there can be no cause of the universe; it is equivalent to asking for the cause of causation.

Ontology is the concern with what is - sometimes called 'the furniture of the world. - unenlightened is a unique structure of matter. Or unenlightened is an embodied soul.

But "what is being?" is best answered with "Yes, being is what is". An alternative and even more informative response would be "Being is, and nothing happens." That is to say that being refers to the static state at a moment in time, and nothing to the continuous flow and transformation that being undergoes from one moment to the next.

Too much of nothing
Can make a man ill at ease
One man's temper might rise
While another man's temper might freeze
In the day of confession
We cannot mock a soul
Oh, when there's too much of nothing
No one has control. — His Bobness

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken. — Cromwell

And indeed My Lord Kelvin was mistaken. Not only were there many, many new things to be discovered (Radioactivity, relativity, a slew of new elements and subatomic particles, quarks and their properties, superconductivity, semiconductors, etc, etc) , but one of the discoveries (quantum mechanics) was that nature itself is imprecise.

Yeah, you sound like a caring responsible sensible person - bad luck! :wink:

It is a question for your heart. — T Clark

:100:

You simply cannot practically look after someone in such a fugue state as an individual while they are in that crisis mode. It is hopefully possible for the professionals to stabilise your sister, get her sleeping regularly and less paranoid and non-violent. There are drug treatments that can help, and a quiet un-stressful environment helps too. Gardening, work with animals, woodland management...

There is no morality that requires you to do the impossible, or what you have no idea how to do. Perhaps there will be times when you can help, but perhaps the family relationship will actually make it impossible for you to help, but on the contrary, will make your presence an aggravating factor. Perhaps, anyway, you have other things to do than take on this responsibility. Listen to the professionals, but with a little scepticism, and refuse to take on more responsibility than you can reliably cope with.

You already have your answer, really, in the behaviour of the science forum. There are questions science does not consider. It is perfectly 'possible' that God created the universe five minutes ago and made it look billions of years old by creating fossils and memories and so on. But there can be no evidence either way until God says out loud "Haha, fooled you!" .

Science is all about summarising the available evidence; Newton's Laws summarise the way we experience things moving, whereas 'God moves in mysterious ways' does not. Science was originally called Natural Philosophy, and sought to understand the mind of God in the order of the creation. It is biased in the same way that any topic is biased in limiting its scope, and ignoring, for example, biblical explanations.

I think it's probably already "too late" to prevent eventual tropic zone catastrophe, only now it's just not yet obvious. — Michael Zwingli

The eventual has already eventuated. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/3/madagascar-is-on-brink-of-first-climate-induced-famine-un-warns

What is there?
How do you know?
What ought we do about it?
what does it mean?

I see philosophy as entangled questions that one cannot tackle one by one in a sensible order. They all arise at once as one finds oneself up a certain creek without the standard means of propulsion.

Philosophy begins in the middle of the muddle of life, and efforts to order the topic are all also questionable. But I would say they are relatively unimportant questions.

I'm not sure I know what metaphysics is, and that is a very common confusion that might explain psychologically why it goes well with epistemology, in a big bucket of 'dunno'.

I don’t think I agree. Your post seems to be focused solely on cognition, whereas “love” is clearly an emotion. Cliched or not, we hear of occurrences like “love at first sight” where one person instantly, and not premeditatedly, feels love for another person. The “X therefore Y” logic you mention is completely lacking in these, and possibly other, situations. — Pinprick

Well I agree with you, even if you disagree with me. :wink:

But my concern is to deal with what I see as the strongest argument. One can of course just say 'it's all twaddle because 'reason is always the slave of passion' as Hume puts it, and strictly it is correct that selfishness is caring about oneself and selflessness is caring about another. But I try to operate closer to where the poster seems to be, which is in the logic of motivation, because they do not claim that love is rare, or limited, but that it is impossible - I take that to mean logically impossible.

"Sense" has two very different but related meanings. There are the senses that inform us of the world, and the ordering of our ideas about the world by which we 'make sense' of what our senses tell us.

Interpreting what others say, is therefore about reconciling ideas about the world between us so as to produce a commonality of sense. This is called communication; communication produces common sense. We see in a state of enmity, that communication breaks down, and common sense flies out the window. In such circumstances, there is no meaning - a bullet communicates "Die!" if you like, the way footprints communicate feet having been there. but there is no commonality here, I am just making my own sense of my own senses.

Change my view, challenge me if you will. — obscurelaunting

It's a fairly commonplace dogma, but completely unjustified and muddled. However, it is certainly possible to be entirely lacking in any care for others, and absolutely self-centred; that is an affliction variously labelled 'sociopath' or 'psychopath'. Much beloved of unimaginative film-makers.

The philosophical confusion stems from a confusion about causation, and about evolution. We understand that evolution proceeds not by genes being self-concerned, but by them randomly changing, and genes beneficial to survival to maturity and reproduction tending to spread in the population. And this is how we big brained apes evolved. However, big brains themselves do not and cannot follow the line of thought of evolution, because evolution is mindless to the extent of being incapable of either selfish or unselfish. Only a self can be selfish, and a self is an idea a brain has of its own functioning.

So a brain has ideas and thoughts along these lines: If I do X, Y will be the result. I want Y, therefore I will do X. And this thought, we can say, causes the brain to instruct the body to perform X. That is what is generally conceived to be the source of this universal selfishness.

The first thing to note is that Y does not cause X. it cannot cause it because it comes after it. X causes Y and Y cannot cause X. Rather it is the idea of Y that (partially) causes X. The world of the mind is the world of ideas, and it is the ideas that are causal agents. So it is perfectly possible to have all sorts of ideas that have little foundation in reality that act as behavioural causes.

But it also divorces ideas from the necessity of benefiting the person at all. For example, whenever anyone plays a game, football, cards, doctors and nurses, Super Mario, or whatever, they pretend that the goal of the game is what they want, and perform as if it matters to them. and then they forget it is only a game. Thus one can love, because one loves the idea of love. It is a simple matter of behaving according to an idea one has in the attempt to realise it. Just like going to the store to realise the idea of a beer, or running round a field trying to kick a ball between 2 posts.

I'll continue to laugh in your "astonished" face. — Xtrix

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him — a nobel prize for literature winner

For those who like the bad news, amid the much trumpeted talk of methane reduction, reservoirs of methane hydrate will quite possibly totally overwhelm any reductions made.

https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/ocean-chemistry/climate-change-and-methane-hydrates/

I'm interested in how people adjust to that kind of thing. If they're even capable of adjusting. — frank

I generally just change my mind when I find I am wrong, which I quite often am. But you have yet to point me to where I am wrong about climate change, apart from treating 100,000 years as 'permanent', which is a bit of a picky criticism even by your standards.

Does anyone else find it a bit hypocritical of David Attenborough — The Opposite

Always glad to join the ragging of a national treasure. What I find hypocritical is the way he spent most of his long career being the acceptable face of Nature as entertainment and avoided all controversy or lending his support to any of the many environmental campaigns and issues over the years, until they became mainstream, and then suddenly in the last few years makes like he is the Spokesman for the Environment, and longstanding member of the Vanguard of the Green Revolution. If eating raw monkey brains was respectable, David would make a programme to celebrate it.

Oh, sorry. 90%, not 100%. — frank

No dude, 10 % after 100,000 years, not 10% after 10,000 years, You're missing a zero again.

About 10% of the CO2 from coal will still be affecting the climate in one hundred thousand years. — David Archer

You are misrepresenting your source, I'm afraid.

The Long Thaw by David Archer, one of the few who's done long range climate modeling.

No, it's not permanent. CO2 is water soluble. — frank

Dude, the book is called "The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate ". Not 10,000 years. I'm not sure I'll be around that long.

We'll be back something close to baseline in 10,000 years. — frank

I'd like some citations on that if you have them. Because the story I heard is that there's no going back. Rather a new equilibrium will be established (assuming no substantial reduction in global emissions) 5 - 8 degrees warmer; no ice on Antarctica or Greenland and that means a sea level rise of about 70 metres.

virtue is expensive and painful.
— unenlightened

Why do you think that is? — TheMadFool

If virtue was fun and profitable, every arsehole would be virtuous.

Here is the reasoning that will destroy us.

There's no point in me reducing my carbon footprint when The Bogeyman is increasing his
The Bogeyman is increasing his carbon footprint.
Therefore there is no point in me reducing my carbon footprint.

It's a familiar story; virtue is expensive and painful. So let's all be Bogeymen.

But in this case there is another argument.

The Bogeyman will kill us all if he doesn't stop being a Bogeyman.
Therefore I am going to stop being the Bogeyman.
Would you like to stop too?

Yes. Try the practice that leads to Nirvana and experience what it is. That or ague a lot and waste your time for nothing.

Consider traffic lights. One might say that red means stop because people stop when the red light shows, and equally that people stop when the red light shows because red means stop. This is the social construction of meaning. One learns the meaning, one acts on the meaning and, one's action exemplifies and conveys the meaning. In other words (that will become boring if you hang around here long enough) "meaning is use". And usage is customary.

>>> Brexit :rage:

What lessons can be learned, then, from those wishing successful outcomes to Cop26 ? — Amity

Keep it simple; keep it nostalgic; keep it racist; repeat hypnotically. Something like this:

"Bring back our White Christmases!" :scream:

Voting Green would seem a sensible thing to do but some see it as a wasted vote, given our political electerol system. — Amity

Those people might consider UKIP. Didn't win many elections, but got their policy through. Losing votes influence winning politicians and other voters; they are never wasted.

Yes, psychology is a science. And the view one get's from inside one's head is the only view one gets. — T Clark

Ok. Not the thread for that argument. I'll leave it there.

'see' rather than 'follow'. — I like sushi

Indeed.

Try it, and find out. No point in asking a bunch of amateur, mainly Western philosophers to speculate in ignorance, no point in trying to understand Nirvana from the outside, as a theory. That's like sitting in the cafe in the valley wondering about the view from the top of the mountain. Save your breath and get your boots on.

I am as likely to know what is going on inside my mind as anyone else.

As I wrote that ,I wondered, do I really believe the things I've just written. I'm not sure. I guess we'll see. — T Clark

I have to smile. Inside your head is quivering meat, the way inside an engine is quivering metal. I am more a psychologist than an engineer, and psychology is not a science because it operates exactly in the contradiction you just neatly expressed there. It turns out that the the view of the inside of one's own head that one gets is a poor one at best.

We have to negotiate the science of engineering with the nonsciense of human nature, philosophers leap in where engineers and psychologists fear to tread and wonder what they themselves believe. Imagine a society of engineers who discover that their engines are destroying the planet; do they have the sense to turn them off? Or do they prefer to believe that it is not so?

We have a legal name for it if directed to a specific person -- slander. — Caldwell

We have a legal name if it isn't too: - fraud.

As an engineer, my job was to know things, know how I knew them, understand the uncertainties in my knowledge, and the consequences of being wrong. — T Clark

Wittgenstein was an engineer. He had this analogy of philosophy as the engine of language idling. So engineers want to put their engines to work, but first there is the need to tune and adjust, which is done with the engine idling. A good engineer probably does not need the manual very often, does not need the advice of his fellows very often, but he does not despise or totally ignore these things either.

1.) I read the menu and choose - "Black coffee and scrambled eggs on toast, please, waitress."

Breakfast is served.


2.) I don't read the menu - "Bring me what I am predetermined to have, please, waitress."
Alas the waitress, though she believes in determinism, is determined to aver that she does not know what I am determined to eat, and that my determined choice must determine what she brings, and if I am determined not to choose she is determined to bring me nothing.

I am determined to fast.

Therefore, I am determined to believe in free will until after breakfast.

Oh, but the ego, the ego, the hurt to the ego!! — baker

Ego is extraordinarily resilient.
Unfortunately.

the logistic nightmare — baker

One thing Covid has demonstrated is the flexibility of logistics. Don't cook, Just Eat. Don't shop, Deliveroo. Consumerism on tap like another utility. Easy! It's time to stop eulogising work - the creation of the devil. Civilisation is about labour-saving devices. Let the robots work, and let us play! But play smart.

Goodness and badness also only exist in our minds, which means they're mental states. — TranscendedRealms

I agree with quite a lot, but not this. I suggest to you that goodness and badness are the relation between mind and world. I think this changes your philosophy for the better.

Buddhists advocate achieving a state of nirvana, which is a state of bliss and no suffering. But, my philosophy treats the best bliss as always being the best thing, while Buddhists would treat certain forms of bliss as being bad. For example, they'd treat bliss that results in harm as being bad, even if it was the best bliss. — TranscendedRealms

Buddhism is not monolithic, but my understanding of the ending of suffering is that it requires the ending of identification. There cannot be an end to pain without an end to the body. (I hope this is uncontroversial). But what makes pain into suffering is psychological time. Pain is now; suffering is the past pain continuing into the future.

This indicates a certain importance of time in your philosophy that You do not seem to account for. The best bliss of the moment may result in future suffering. Now I want a cigarette/drink/fiix, that produces in the present the best bliss, and in the future the suffering of not having ...

So when you say the best bliss is always the best thing, my question is how far your identification extends through time. Is the best thing in the moment, the best thing for always?