Part of Unenlightened's "poorer and learn to live simple and consume little" will be doing without a car, electric or combusted. Therefore, mass transit or walk. Americans especially find the idea of using mass transit every day bizarre and/or distasteful. — Bitter Crank

Yeah, I'm not actually advocating misery; imagine removing all the cars from the roads. Imagine the peaceful environment that results. Add back plenty of quiet, clean cheap electric busses, and trams. Society saves billions in the cost of cars, and can afford for transport to be very cheap. It's interesting to consider what one expects to have privately and what one expects to share. Perhaps instead of a car, everyone needs a garden or allotment. Travel independence or food independence?

What I want to emphasise is that the things folk find impossible to contemplate giving up are very very recent necessities, that many people have done without for many centuries and many people still live without. And that we are not noticeably happier for our private transport or our central heating. On the contrary, we have a worse diet, worse health, more stress and an impoverished environment.

Poorer is better.

Voltaire? — Tom Storm

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. — Hume

Which is more important, knowing shit or giving a fuck?

Answer: giving a fuck. If you don't give a fuck about the shit you know, it's not even going to win you Mastermind, because why would you even enter?. Whereas if you give a fuck about stuff you don't know shit about, you will fuck about with it and maybe learn something.

How do you define human condition? Is it something that includes conscience and soul?
Or is it based human desire and instinkt? — SpaceDweller

By the 'human condition' I simply mean the state we humans are more or less all in that is peculiar to humans, which is primarily a state of mind.

If you would like to define conscience and soul and desire and instinct I'll try tell you how I think they relate to what I have said. But really, it would be better just to try and understand each other as though we already speak the same language to a great extent.

No it's knowledge of what good and what's evil. — SpaceDweller

Yes, it helps to get the story straight. I read the story as a psychological explanation of the human condition, and a pretty insightful one. We start in paradise, in which humans are king of the beasts, as it were, but still innocent in the sense of offering neither praise nor condemnation. Everything is what it is and nothing ought to be otherwise. This is the state of nature, where cancer cells thrive and grass springs up and is eaten and trampled, and so on, without complaint, and predators eat prey or starve.

Now the story itself constitutes the definition of good and evil that folks want, and it is perfectly clear that it is a function of the mind; that is to say, the opening of possibilities. Possibilities are not realities. Possibilities give rise to choices, not just immediate choices of fight or flight or whatever, but premeditated choices between possible futures.

If my wife has had a good night's sleep, then it would be good if I take her a cup of coffee, but if she has been up half the night, it would be good if I let her sleep. If I also knew how she had slept, I could be certain of doing good, but alas...

Thus good and evil enter the world in the form of the implementation of choices of imagined possible futures. Such is the human condition, for example, that we currently see the possibility of destroying the environment, whereas the buffalo do not see that they transform nature, or imagine that they could do otherwise; we do, and thus are condemned to choose. Our world is a moral world because it is a world of future possibilities, whereas the rest of nature is innocent, and remains in the present.

We have fallen out of the world of what is, into a world of thought and imagination, of what could be or might have been - out of the present, into time.

On the fiddle while the world burns.

I don't see people anywhere that people are willing to give up their freedom today for something they cannot fathom happening tomorrow. — I like sushi

That is the problem, and that is why we have fantasists in government talking nonsense and making no decisions. It's past time to make some sacrifices or become the sacrifice. So far, emissions are still increasing, even through Covid lockdowns. We haven't even begun to reduce.

Cut out the beef, and reduce the demand for more rainforest to become pasture and reduce the methane.
Cut out the car, and use public transport sparingly. There is not enough old cooking oil to power mass tourism, whatever the New Scientist says.
Insulate.
Plant trees and re-wild.
Expect to become poorer and learn to live simple and consume little.
Vote green.
And HURRY UP. If you don't change your lifestyle, you won't have a life of any style.

I am alas old enough to remember the good old days when the economy was tanking and we were applying to join the EEC as then was, and DeGaulle kept notoriously saying "Non." How right he turned out to be.

But the UK economy was well fucked to the extent that cash limits were set on foreign holidays because the currency was nosediving. We had already gone from being the richest economy in the world to this parlous state and Europe eventually rescued us. It's the period of history that Brexiteers forget or ignore in favour of the good old days of Empire and children down the mines.

Consensus! How extraordinary. — Banno

Must be wrong, then.

If life = simulation, then death = 'game over'. This is a repetition in garbled pseudoscience of the standard religious trope, that the 'real' is 'beyond'; that there is an afterlife in which possibly your score in the game of life is important. Your reward is in heaven. Or, in another version, you are addicted to the game and keep playing until you get the highest possible score.

That's 'what if...'. People are sooo religious, especially when they deny it.

Of course the truth is that this world is a virtual reality insane asylum; You are strongly advised not to crucify the therapists. It doesn't harm them at all, but it looks bad on your case notes.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. I am a specialist, God help me, in events in inner space and time, in experiences called thoughts, images, reveries, dreams, visions, hallucinations, dreams of memories, memories of dreams, memories of visions, dreams of hallucinations, refractions of refractions of refractions of that original Alpha and Omega of experience and reality, that Reality on whose repression, denial, splitting, projection, falsification, and general desecration and profanation our civilisation as much as anything is based. — R. D. Laing

If I were you, I wouldn't start from here.

You can certainly live a fulfilled life and make a contribution to the world without a scrap of philosophy. On the other hand, there is much to be said for learning to think deeply and carefully about things.

My advice would be to avoid philosophy unless you find yourself unable to. Whatever direction you take, science, politics, social work, there is a philosophy thereof that questions the methods and principles of the topic. If you keep finding yourself concerned with these questions, then alas you are a philosopher and you will have to do the hard work, of trying to understand the roots of things.

Go away from this site at once. Or if you find yourself unable to leave, welcome to our world.

One of the difficulties of this discussion is that pain is not a simple sensation, but a sensation under judgement. Or more likely a complex of sensations in a context under judgement. Consider, for example the burning sensation produced by chillies. Pain can be explored, and modified; one's 'threshold' can be raised or lowered.

Nevertheless, if you cut Wittgenstein, does he not bleed? As with 'red', we are talking about the sensation - the negativity of the sensation - first-aiders are taught to apply some harmless pain to an unresponsive person to see if they are conscious or not. We know how to do it and what it feels like because we practice on each other. We assume our sensations are alike enough because our bodies and our reactions are alike enough. I think this is called a 'theory of mind'. You might just be howling at the moon, but I noticed you dropped that rock on your foot and now you are hopping on the other and clutching your foot as well as howling. I think you are in pain, and the pain is in your foot just there where the blood is oozing out. I'll fetch the Germoline.

There just aren't any relations being pointed at, like there are things being pointed at. Unless you're Plato. — bongo fury

I must be Plato, then. But no, When the cat is on the mat, the real cat is really on the real mat. But there is no eternal realm containing the form of 'on' nor the forms of cat and mat. Relations are real. This is really a response to your post and not really unrelated to it. But mathematics is the study of relations in the abstract, and that is why counting works for beans and spoons and sheep. To put it another way, mathematics is the study of possible relations, and of course not everything possible is actual. but when relations are actual, one can indeed point to them, and it is an ambiguity of pointing that Mr W. alludes to somewhere, that one cannot exactly tell whether one is pointing at the left pant, the right pant or the whole pair, or to its lurid pink colour, or something else, because pointing fails to specify its units.

Every schoolboy knows, that if he has 6 pairs of pants, then he has a dozen pants.

Banno has spoons on the table. I prefer beans if there are five, or ducks if they are aligned, but spoons will do. A teaspoon, a dessertspoon a soupspoon and a couple of love-spoons. Five spoons. So I pick them up one by one and say to you 'this is a spoon, it is not a number' each time until I have all the spoons back in the drawer, and then I say - 'there is no five on the table, and I have not picked it up, Therefore there is no five and never was. It was empty talk.

I doubt you are convinced. I hope you are not. It's the old stuff and arrangements switcheroo. There is stuff, and stuff is always in some kind of arrangement - the cat is on or off the mat, the spoons are on the table or in the drawer, the ducks are in a row or not, the beans form a hill or do not. This is the reality about which we like to talk and share tales of. Cats and ducks and beans and spoons and arrangements and quantities and relations of them. Things arranged - cat on mat - each word refers to reality - things in relation. The relation is as real as the things. But it is not the stuff. This is conventionally physicalist materialist, but materialists do not deny the reality of structure and mathematics is the study of structure. One counts things, and one does not count nothing. one gets things in a row, or one on another, but not nothings. As they say in schoolboy physics, "state your units". There is no 'on' unless something is on another thing, and there is no 'five' unless there are five spoons, or beans, or schoolboys.

"

We... — Varde

The group mind? A small word that carries a heavy load in many a philosophy. Now that really is a strange concept that I cannot understand. Clearly, we (thou and I) are not of one mind (do not share the same understanding) concerning many things.

What's a 'concept'? What's ' 'understood'? Without mind nothing can be conceived or understood.

I can conceive that I understand that the cat creeping across the lawn is minded to catch the sparrow digging for worms.

But if your point is merely that a hand cannot grasp itself, that too is readily understood. That's what relationships are for.

Life's too short. In particular it's too short to engage with people who think they are purveyors of "challenging ideas". And I don't buy much snake oil either.

I think when there is commanding of self by self, it is a conflict; if there is an effort to be something, even/ especially to be stoical, then one is not stoical. But let's try to be stoical about this paradox - or let's not try and be stoical about it, as that would be more stoical. Stoicism occurs naturally when all passion is spent, but when passion is resisted, denied, repressed, unexpressed, it is not being spent but saved. One is like a miser who cannot repair his leaking roof because he is always saving for a rainy day.

One can be satisfied in their depression or current apathy, no? — Shawn

Well you are the expert in this, but you don't read satisfied.

ALL is best, though we oft doubt,
What th' unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns
And to his faithful Champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns
And all that band them to resist
His uncontroulable intent.
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind all passion spent. — John Milton

Samson Agonistes.

What sayest thou ? — Amity

What are your thoughts? — Shawn

Consider time.

We are natural stoics wrt the past. Good or bad, we take it as it went. Currently, I am writing this, and I am stoical about the present too. It is what it is. Until it's shit, and then I want to escape; which is to say 'I want the future to be other than this'. Desire and fear are the push-me-pull-you pet of the failed stoic; they relate to the future. To be fearful of desire, or desirous of escaping fear is to be caught up in the world.

Be caught up in the world, therefore, while you can. There will be time enough to be a stoical corpse.

This seemed like a decent comment on the article.

I think the liar paradox meets mathematics at division by zero. If "I am lying" creates a paradox, then what about (a^2-b^2)/(a-b)=a+b? That "sentence" is true except when a=b, in which case we are purporting to divide by zero, which we cannot do, because no such operation is defined in mathematics. Thus, where a=b, the purported division does not "fail" or "create a paradox." It is gibberish. — Remarkl

"Do not attempt what cannot be done" is the civil engineer's mantra. Bridges that relied on division by zero might well fail.

Pythagorus (or Euclid?) 'made up' an explanation for why the Egyptians used a 3,4,5 triangle as a set square. But if geometry (the clue's in the name) hadn't already been part of creation, it wouldn't have worked and he wouldn't have had anything to invent.

I would suggest that mathematics is the study of possible worlds, and paradox is the study of impossible worlds such as those depicted by Escher. Beautifully precise drawings, and fascinating, but an engineers's joke. In this respect I am with W. ; there is little danger of an engineer trying to build an Escher building, or dividing by zero.

{Possible worlds are possible structures, arrangements, orderings and disorderings processes, etc. Thus mathematics abstracts the structure from the substance of the world. Invented in the sense that there cannot be a structure of nothing; real in the sense that substance always has a structure. }

The news show I watch keeps announcing we have a child care crisis and the government should fix it. — Athena

The feminist solution was "wages for housework". My mother was extremely smart, but as soon as she married, she had to give up her job in the bank, and become a housewife - bank rules and social pressure was that married women did not work (except fishwives of course, but being married to a fisherman was a bit part-time and likely temporary, and thus easily despicable).

As I have mentioned elsewhere, patriarchal society depends on the control of women's sexuality. The childcare crisis is part of the way the patriarchy pressurises women, (alongside restricted abortion of course) Traditionally, unpaid domestic service kept women dependent. (Fishwives were proverbially foul-mouthed, because they had some financial independence.)

But the root of the modern problem is that children are a glut in the market. Men can produce robots more efficiently than women can produce babies, and they are cheaper to run. And of course the sex is better too. So. we look forward to a world without work, without women and without children. And that will solve the climate problem too, as well as the childcare crisis; a win, win.

Absolutely not! I already have an arsehole. (He says non-judgementally.) This may be hard for you to understand, but some of us are not desirous of more material goods, money or power. Enough is as good as a feast, and so my life is a constant feast that Besos cannot even imagine. I can have macaroni cheese as often as I like!

I think you're just envious of Bezos. — stoicHoneyBadger

I feel happy and totally non-judgemental. — stoicHoneyBadger

:rofl: I'm totally envious of your non-judgmental prowess.

So why do you think a baker bakes bread at night? — stoicHoneyBadger

Because we all need our daily bread. Why do you think a baker wants money? I have been a baker, and I can assure you that they do not collect money, but exchange it for all the stuff they need apart from bread. You do not understand money or capitalism - it is in the first instance a social enterprise, It is convenient if while I am making my bread, I make yours too, and while you are spinning your wool, you spin some for me too. Money is a medium of exchange that keeps the score and supposedly ensures that selfish people cannot take advantage of social people. Capitalism is the way some of them still manage to. Do you think Jeff Besos delivers all those parcels himself? No. other people do all the work and he takes a cut from between the cooperative exchange. That's why he is called an entrepreneur - it is a French-derived term that means a 'between-taker'.

Such people are indeed selfish in everything they do, but most people want to do a good job and satisfy other's needs, along with their own. They are grateful to the bus-driver, the shop-assistant the refuse collector, the nurse, the plumber, the road mender, and all the many people met and unmet that help to sustain their lives. They go the extra mile out of their way to make another happy, even if the other is greedy and ungrateful. It's a wonder that anyone can not notice this about other people. Like the people who run this site - they make no money and get far more abuse than praise, but they like to help out to make all our lives a bit better. It's quite normal.

1. people always act in their own interest. — stoicHoneyBadger

I am more stating that the majority of people would act in their self-interests, not necessary all of them. ) — stoicHoneyBadger

I'd say that people expand their sense of self over to their child. — stoicHoneyBadger

I'd say you are trying to make the facts fit your theory when they clearly contradict it. Once the self is expanded to include others, you really have stretched the concept of self-interest way past its breaking point. The only question of interest, is the psychological one, why many people like to cling to the bankrupt notion of the inevitability of self-interested behaviour.

I suggest that the answer is that it is an attempt to justify their own selfishness and assuage their feelings of guilt and shame about it. But this is supported by the greed of the rich and powerful, who set out to convince folk of the inevitability of their hegemony and the impossibility of a more cooperative and equitable society.

But the facts are that most people could not survive at all without the vast network of cooperative effort that we call 'the economy'. The fantasy of the separate self can only be maintained because of this global cooperation that puts food on the table, water in the taps, and power in the wires. Humans are social, and language is the supreme facilitator of sociality. A long childhood of total dependence and and a concomitant long social education allow the transmission of culture, which is more adaptable than genetic inheritance, and this has been observed in other apes too. This is why big brains confer an advantage, and language an even bigger advantage; they are social facilitators, much more than individual ones. Recite this three times before bed: "There is nothing rational about self-interest."

1. people always act in their own interest. — stoicHoneyBadger

The fact that folks have to be told to put the mask on themselves first ( and not the child, or vulnerable adult next to them) demonstrates without question or equivocation, that people do not always act in their own interest, even when it is prudent for themselves, and in the best interests of others that they do. Hence, incentive theory is irretrievably false. Bish, bash, bosh.

if you explain the meaning of the term......cynicism — Nickolasgaspar

As far as I can tell, 'cynicism' in this context is an accusation you are levelling at me, as a way of evading the obvious difficulty of actually following the project recommended in the op. But read the link and get back to me. It's a classic of modern philosophy, and I have it on my shelf.

What would the be most major impacts/consequences for the globe in this brief but major widespread return to a pre-globalised technological dark age? — Benj96

Much whinging! I remember the old forum going down for ages more than a day - the world literally stopped turning, and philosophy has still not recovered.

I mean what he meant.

Define=explain what you mean by that word. — Nickolasgaspar

Explain what you mean by "mean".

I always refer such discussions to Ogden and Richards. A look at chapter 6 will be most helpful in elucidating the scope and application of 'definition', a term that has not yet been defined in this thread.

After a discussion of the definition of 'beauty', there is a review of the uses at that time made of the term 'meaning' in academia from philosophy to psychology and beyond. And at last chapter 9 produces the 16 main definitions (not counting slight variants) favoured by "reputable students of Meaning".

Carry on from there until you have either decided you can manage without definitions, or died of despair.

Try a bit of history of philosophy.

There was this Triad: God, Man, Nature. They made sense together, because God created Man 'in His image'. This gives Man an 'unnatural aspect' - no one would have put it that way, but you are atheistic scum so it doesn't matter. So the existence of God is what keeps Man and Nature separate and distinct.

And as we can see in the thread, without God, no one can tell the difference between a bird's nest and The Empire State building.

...How ultimately does right prevail over wrong...?

It doesn't. If it did, being moral would be mere common sense prudence.

Isn't that what wokeness is really about? It's this vengeful, threatening, tone: "don't be unbiased!" — frank

Have you accidentally doubled the negative here?

we might consider our own participation in the problem of drugs, rape, homicide, and joblessness — Joshs

Herewith, some consideration.

The UK is currently agonising over, (or being entertained by) a case of a serving police officer found guilty of the kidnap, rape and murder of a random stranger.

This has become associated with ideas of culture of misogyny in the police, and a cultish mutual protection and failure to self investigate, and has been connected to a general failure to prosecute and convict rape, domestic violence and so on. It has strong resonance with the race thing.

Now my analysis is not much considered in the media, but it goes like this. The position of women in the UK is much better than under the Taliban, but not different in kind. They are both patriarchal cultures. Women's liberation movement, suffrage, and equality legislation has not changed things all that much.

Consider matrilineal society, as discussed by anthropologists, a kinship system in which ancestral descent is traced through maternal instead of paternal lines. What this means, for a man, is that your children, those for whom you are responsible, those who will inherit your estate, are not your wife/girlfriend's children, but your sister's. It is quite hard to empathise with the mindset that takes this for granted, and the first obvious effect is that is changes the nature of the family radically. The nuclear family does not exist. But that is just the beginning.

No more paternity tests! It simply doesn't matter who the father is, and who the mother is is usually obvious. The sex act therefore loses most of its importance to society, monogamy becomes unimportant, marriage a quaint and non-functional custom.

So if one can stand there in the imagination, and regard patriarchy, one sees that the over-riding necessity for the functioning of patriarchy is the control of female sexuality. And one immediately sees that rape and domestic violence have a vital function in patriarchy. Just as thieves function in society to maintain banks and the security industry, so rapists function to maintain the purity of the patrilineal line. It is an absolute requirement of the patrilineal system that women's sexuality is controlled by fear. It's a dangerous unpleasant and under appreciated job, but someone's got to do it.

Why not start with everything, — god must be atheist

It's unavailable.

Reality _ the current dream.

So if you want to convince the other party, you need to understand their heuristic. If that's "I don't trust the government and big pharma" you'll have to figure out why. And when you have the why, you can perhaps explore whether that distrust is appropriate in this particular case, and if so whether that distrust, which avoids a certain risk, outweighs the risk of following up on that distrust. At the very least we'll have a conversation instead of how we're talking at cross purposes now. — Benkei

Hmm. So you're doing that on this thread? Having a conversation with the anti-vaxers? I must have missed it.

What I am describing is the condition under which conversation is impossible. It is a psychological condition of radical distrust. It is actually impossible to sustain, and therefore results in a fixation on the most off the wall explanation - illuminati lizards or whatever global conspiracy, and anything you might say already has the ready explanation that you are either a dupe of the conspiracy, or part of the conspiracy. The conspiracy theory is heuristic if you like, but it functions more like a cult religion.

we have to have a moral commitment to the truth,
— unenlightened

...just becomes nothing more than a stick to beat one's enemies with - "see, it's they who are not committed to the truth, — Isaac

That's not true, (he says getting out his big stick and beating Issac mercilessly.) Rather, I have no stick, and the truth is not a sword either. I am committed to truth, and communication. If no one else is, I'm fucked anyway, but that is the only thing that I can make sense of. Someone who does not have that commitment becomes part of the uncommunicative world, not an enemy - like a lion, maybe, or a virus or an advert.

I might be lying about this of course, because people do, and I really mean that; you might need to keep that possibility in mind.

What do we do, un? — Srap Tasmaner

Let's be good: be honest and trustworthy; be kind and helpful; be generous and forgiving. It's very old-fashioned, but there really is no other way. I think the social tradition for a few thousand years has been to try to impose solidarity by the power of violence and threat, and there seems no other way to impose it. But it is a nonsense of course. Solidarity naturally arises when there is no attempt to impose it, and every attempt to impose it creates more division.

I'm not at all clear what you are saying. I am saying that we are inescapably social and interdependent - we have to trust or die alone. Therefore we have to have a moral commitment to the truth, or die alone. I am saying that if we continue to valorise "rational self-interest" we will all die alone.