If the concept of causality is necessary to intelligibly structure experience, then all experience must presuppose it in some way — Noisy Calf

Well, all intelligible structures of experience. I suggest that A cat can wait by a mouse hole for a mouse by means of a structured experience that we can articulate intelligibly, but a the cat cannot. My take on Hume is that his concern is to draw the limits of logic and verbal reasoning. There is a widespread materialist bias that finds the idea that one cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is' totally convincing and irrefutable, but the idea that one cannot derive a 'will be' from a 'has been' somehow contradictory.

And in neither case is Hume making an attack on the world, that there is no such thing as causation, or that there is no such thing as morality. Rather, he is making an attack on overblown rationalism that thinks it can make the world conform to thought, instead of conforming thought to the world.

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

This "passion" is the rock on which Humean philosophy stands, roughly translated as 'giving a damn' or 'caring'. Reason seeks to be dispassionate, but there is no reason to reason if one does not give a damn, thus passion is what is necessary to intelligibly structure experience: the cat cares about mice, and that is the primary structure of its experience prior to any reasoning it might or might not be capable of.

Philosophy is like painting: there has been no progress since the cave painting of prehistory {as Picasso I think said}. In an age that is addicted to accumulation and progress, everything has to pretend to be new and improved. This is my brand new and improved meta-philosophy and is far better than all the posts that preceded it. Now available in bite-size packages and delivered to your devices for today's man in a hurry.

Well no, knowing is not enough. Living is practice, not theory. I guess it's like riding a bike; there's a theory about how the steering can be managed so as to stay upright when moving, but you have to get on the bike and do it, and fall off a few times, or in this case a few thousand times. But you can have a go, next time someone calls you an idiot or completely derails your really important and interesting thread, at trying to understand them as if they were doing their best to get what they need - a feeling of self worth or something, and that is the only way they know how - Instead of telling them to fuck off with their idiotic ad-homs and irrelevances. Changing habits is not easy, and when the whole society since history began is steeped in violence, competition, manipulation, it is hard to see how something else could even work at all ever, never mind be the way society as a whole functions.

I don't know really, try it on yourself first, and then on your good friend if you have one, and and then maybe on some grouch you meet momentarily. Don't try it on your worst enemy first. There are free courses you can do if you want to solve the Israel/Palestine conflict or some such.

When one gives up smoking, or the ghost, who does one give it to?

A guillotine hunts down and attacks a human on its own once the human is in place and the lever is pulled.

We wouldn't want to become Europe, after all. — James Riley

Some of us already are Europe, alas.

the zombie apocalypse — frank

That's when 'the bodies pile high', isn't it?

Since when has the medical profession conducted itself like the military industrial complex? The Spanish Flu? — James Riley

My reference was to Leprosy and the Black Death. Here's a thesis you can argue with if you like. When the stakes are cultural survival, individual rights are irrelevant. When there is a disease like leprosy with no cure that is a slow, disfiguring, death sentence, we the civilised democratic decent religious or irreligious people, care more to keep our society healthy than the rights of lepers. This is a stronger imperative than war, because one can be defeated in war and survive.

I'm old fashioned; I think everyone has a perfect right to be unprotected and infectious, provided they give other folks a wide berth by ringing a bell and shouting "unclean, unclean!", whenever anyone comes near. We civilised folks of course will reserve the right to disinfect their homes by burning them to the ground, and to shoot them like rabid dogs if they approach the village.

Define acted on. Let's say I'm entirely powerless but I tell an important CEO constantly that blacks are lazy. I'm not really helping and if he takes me seriously ... — Benkei

... then you are not powerless. The power behind the throne is still power. I'm not sure I want to fall down the definitional rabbit hole, but I agree stereotypes are always potentially harmful, and that because no one is entirely impotent. So speech is an act, as has been mentioned; muttering under one's breath is an act and we know that some people's speech acts are more influential than other's. If no one hears me, or no one pays any attention, then my act has no real effect. To the extent it affects anyone it has power. I think that is clear enough?

And again, you are exhibiting the perfect subject syndrome. You are acting exactly how the structures are designed. — Caldwell

I am responding to you; you are not a machine. This is not a syndrome nor is it subjective.

Analysis is mechanical, but scholars are not, and because of this, their analysis is always out of control, and never complete. Even scholars do not know.

The stereotype becomes toxic though when it is applied by - say - social workers to separate the deserving from the undeserving poor, because even if it were usually true, if it is not universally true it must result in injustice.
— unenlightened

A fair point and I agree with the bolder portion in particular. A good example of a stereotype being unacceptable because it is used in fallacious reasoning. — DingoJones

Well I'll press you a little there. Imagine the same social worker applies the same fallacious reasoning in choosing a life partner. It seems to me that this is something one might remonstrate about if one cared for the social worker as a friend, but not something socially unacceptable in the way that it would be applied to professional life, and that because the social worker has power qua social worker as distinct from the privilege of personal foibles in private life. Liberty requires us to accept the one and find the other unacceptable.

I like the 'when' in the title. A stereotype is unacceptable when the (pre)judgement is acted on, and is directly proportional to the power and authority of the actor.

Fat people do tend to be lazier. They are unhealthy and have less energy. That’s is a negative judgement sure, but an accurate generalization. — DingoJones

I don't know if it is accurate on average. It might be misleading anyway, because stereotypically, unhealthy people have less energy and tend to do less and so run to fat because of illness rather than laziness. The stereotype becomes toxic though when it is applied by - say - social workers to separate the deserving from the undeserving poor, because even if it were usually true, if it is not universally true it must result in injustice.

The language is a bit obscure to this ancient white dinosaur. Nevertheless, I catch the general drift I think.

And why must all of the following, for example, "clearly" be white people:

1) Religious hypocrtites
2) Opioid addicts
3) Adultereres
4) Strippers
5) Maskless morons
6) Unwed mothers

That, if anything, is a racist assumption on your part. — Baden

They don't have to be,

these "Gawd-fearing folks" belong to the least educated, least healthy, demographic in the US. — Not T Clark

I wonder what demographic that is? Could it be this one?

But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game — Bob Dylan

To speak of race is always to take a risk, but the risk of not speaking is a far more damaging form of racism. Let me say out loud that the dreadful history of the manufacture of race and the institutionalisation of racism as ghettoising, apartheid, has damaged us all and continues to damage us all. But clearly the history of Europe and America is all one way and none of the other way. To suggest that there is a legacy of black superiority that needs to be addressed by special threads and moderation to protect white folks is an insult to the intelligence of a moron.

We can talk about white people in various ways, and we need to be able to, to make sense of history, of the whole colonial story of which the slave trade and colonisation of the Americas was a large part, and the troubles social and psychological that we inherit on all sides. We need to make sense of it and take steps to ameliorate the ongoing damage.

So, human interactions can be designed, controlled, and maintained such that the apparatus is not felt, or known. — Caldwell

No they cannot. Psychology operates in the realm of statistical effects, and the power is undeniable. Nevertheless it is the psyche that designs and controls the psycho-social. But this conversation is out of control, because there are no statistics about who will convince whom of what, or what novel idea will perhaps be born of our interaction. Even Google does not know.

Because that is what the structures want you to think and behave. — Caldwell

Machines that want?

That there are personal and private lives -- and you can separate the two. — Caldwell

But I don't think that. Do you?

The machine teaches you how to generate the rhythm, though. — thewonder

The mountain teaches you how to climb. But it doesn't oblige you to climb.

Yeah, well, tell that to Foucault and the likes. Apparently, the apparatus is in all of our lives. — Caldwell

They don't talk to me, unfortunately. The apparatus of thought is in all our lives, and thought is mechanical; thought produces that wonderful machine for living, the panopticon, and so on. But if one lives in a machine and according to the machine, one lives a mechanical life - an oxymoronic non-life. But for all its potent impotence, it remains an anological construction and human relations are not mechanical relations except by performance. The scientific urge is to understand and control the world in mechanical terms, but there is nothing mechanical about understanding. The mechanical analogy is so pervasive, it sounds rather 'woo' to question it. But there is no evidence - gotta love the science-speak - that the world operates mechanically; on the contrary, there is much evidence that even machines do not: they breakdown precisely because they lack the caring relation to the world, as does thought.

I don't think any rational person would ever trust the Chinese government, to be honest. — Apollodorus

Whereas most governments, or special god blessed governments at least, would be trusted by any rational person. (irony alert)

So the 'stimulus' is what the other person does, the 'cause' is our thinking and the 'root' is the fact we were educated to think violently, or is it our unmet need? I don't understand what the root is — The Opposite

I think it is collective habit. perhaps even addiction. which is to say that the root is more or less "The Fall" if you can Adam and Eve it. Every stupid TV program includes the mantra "there can only be one winner." It's actually a contradiction to the fundament of capitalism that a trade must benefit both parties, but apart from that, it is the essence of violent thought And I suppose that violence always starts with a thought of winning , because the biology is 'fight or flight', not 'fight or else'.

You don't know why you angry, man? What kind of dumb is that?

Hush!

The problem is too many people trying to solve too many problems.

Sport is inherently unfair, as cack-handed wimps like myself have to compete with people who give a fuck and try to win. Some of them even practice.

I met that dishwasher. But when the dishwasher breaks, Muggins can do the dishes in another rhythm. whereas when Muggins is off sick, the dishwasher sits there looking important and doing exactly nothing. Machines abstract and metal certainly exist. But they control nothing. We feed the machine because we want to, not because the machine dictates.

In so far that there is social control, something or someone must arbitrate it. — thewonder

I hesitate, because it is a well misused argument; but indulge me in a crude consideration of evolution. It seems to me that a big brained tool-using social mammal has the advantage of fast (compared to evolutionary time) adaptation to an unstable environment, where such adaptation includes the manipulation of the environment itself. If it turns cold, instead of evolving thicker fur or heading South, clever monkey builds a house and steals the skin of other animals to wear. All this in the name of mammalian temperature control, just like the fur of polar bears.

Monkey likes bananas; clever monkey plants bananas. But clever monkey cannot think in global space, or evolutionary time. So temperature control is local and temporary. The adaptation to climate instability turns out to increase climate instability. There is no control mechanism for the control mechanism. Politics and government ought to, but don't seem to be able to deal with pandemics or climate change. The society that was supposed to allow adaptation has become rigid. That's why, in my previous analogy, they are like the riverbanks in a floodplain - they constrain the river, but arbitrarily and so temporarily. No one is in charge, and nothing is under control. Come back God, all is forgiven!

there being further and further automation over social and political life. — thewonder

Well I question this automation idea.

There is no "who", the apparatuses are automatic -- like I said, even the actors in it are unaware of the machinations. — Caldwell

I question the mechanical metaphor.

Consider a river that has a course, and we see that the course changes by the oxbow lakes and so on, but the course is stable over a lifetime, most of the time. But there is a day of revolution when the bank is breached and the meander is short-circuited. There is no who and no apparatus either. The river operates on itself, and the river is the water and the course. A river is never broken.

Machinations are appropriate to political thought because thought is mechanical; but life is not.

Personally I think nobody should own land that is considered "holy" or of religious historic value. Not lived on. Just held as a tourist destination without current financial interests.
— TiredThinker

That's how I feel about the commons. Wilderness "untrammeled by man" is sacred, holy, to me. — James Riley

That's how I feel about the whole world. But some folks worship property, I think it's called "capitalism". To them the commons is a tragedy.

It always seems like a backwards kind of question to me. It just seems an obvious way to respond to the environment to animate it with the same kind of being that one finds in oneself. I have thoughts desires awareness and emotion; why would I not assume that tigers, olive trees, rivers, and volcanos are similarly endowed? You can still hear the same thinking on the news daily, about how the virus is trying to outwit the vaccine, the storm is threatening to do serious damage, and so on.

Ask yourselves rather why you refrain from such ideas. I rather ask if you do refrain? Who has not given their car a damn good thrashing when it refuses to start?

They are no other? Are we a single amorphous mass of humanity like a big fat jellyfish floating on the world ocean? — Apollodorus

That was me. Less of that 'we' while you are denying the connectedness of this highly social species, though admittedly not as highly social as a jellyfish colony. But the separation of cultures is a matter of education, not biology.

Now that I've defended my honor, — csalisbury

Your Honour is in no danger from me, and you are quite right to point out the spurious attribution. I should be more careful when straying from my formal education topics.

___________________________________________________________

But anyway, property (real estate) as has been mentioned, is a social construct. Accordingly, where there is conflict between cultures, one cannot simply have recourse to "the facts". For instance, the claim of ownership by reason of being first people is a cultural construction. The first people may have no concept of land ownership, or an inverted one where people belong to the land not land to people.

And this can be used by a culture of real estate agents to claim the land for themselves as if a culture that is not so possessive doesn't have any status at all in the matter.

The more things can be controlled, the more out of control things are. My position is that we live in an anarchy, and unfortunately there are no rules or governance to prevent folks from forming governments.

I follow your posts with interest and confusion, as I do several posters. But it seems to me that the desire to mechanise the human is doomed to frustration. Humans are subject to social control but the social is merely the generalised human. So social control acts like locking the handlebars on a bicycle; the direction is controlled but balance is lost. The human psyche as society can be reduced to the mentality of the dictator, but the mentality of the dictator cannot be stable. Social collapse is inevitable.

Self-control is all about letting go.

When nothing is done, then all will be well. — Lao Tzu

I hide under the bedclothes and pray God to make it stop.

The natural course of history is that spiders eat flies. The problem for the spider is how to catch a fly, and the problem for the fly is how to avoid the spider's trap. If you know who you are, you know what your problem is, and if you have no identity, you have no problem.

But generally, people who claim there are no problems are pretending not to be spiders, so watch out little fly!

I think we should all be cautious of taking up another people as reservoir for our moral ideals & fantasies. — csalisbury

They are no other!

And let all men say what they will, so long as such are rulers as call the land theirs, upholding this particular propriety of mine and thine, the common people shall never have their liberty, nor the land be ever freed from troubles, oppressions, and complainings, by reason whereof the Creator of all things is continually provoked... — Gerald Winstanley

https://www.diggers.org/digger_tracts.htm

But there you go; as white and Christian and historical as you could possibly wish for, and within a cannon shot of where I was born.

Homework for tonight.

Is abortion human sacrifice? Compare and contrast the story of Abraham and Issac with that of an unmarried woman of small means considering abortion. Speak for God.

I don't know what human digits are. — TaySan

digits = fingers and toes. Sorry, English is a wretched language for non-native speakers. The human form develops in part through selective cell death. Thus human sacrifice is "natural". What I mean is that Nature is cruel or kind, makes sacrifices or cooperates, according to circumstance and according to its nature. One can to an extent imagine human nature as somewhat like that of chimpanzees and bonobos, but the question of what one ought to do must presume that one's nature does not dictate, and nor does the environment -physical or social.

To put one's faith in God is to harken to a moral voice that has no material existence and is utterly mysterious. What I ought to do is not what has to be, or what I want, or what you want; rather it is "the space at the wheel's hub that makes it useful" as Lao Tzu put it. The no-thing of creativity.

But to your other comment, do you not have a rational basis (as opposed to an empirical one) for believing in the existence of justice or must faith also play a role? — Hanover

I do not require justice to exist in order to believe in justice. Rather the inverse, it is the existence of injustice that demands that I believe in justice. The builder has to have faith in the architect's plans, because the building does not exist. What he does not do, my sensible builder, is complain that the plans are too thin to hold up the roof.

Warning! Idiosyncracy. — TheMadFool

What I don't understand is why you want to make a new interpretation and persuade us that you are telling a better story.

What does all this mean? In seven simple words, "morality requires you to surrender your ego." — TheMadFool

It's not that I disagree with your seven simple words, but that is obviously not what this story is about at all, because if it was about that and everyone had got it wrong up 'til now, it would be a crap teaching story. There are stories that teach ego renunciation but not this one.

-and I still think fixing academia requires restructuring academic incentive structures. But that is for the other thread. — csalisbury

Well on this thread I can perhaps present my position more clearly. The Academy resides on route 66 despite its monastic origins. So I grant your point for the reformation of the academy, simply noting how 'Jackal' that is. But down here on highway 61 where we get the killing done, and the dissolution of the monasteries and so on, there are no grades, and no tenure on offer. Say a true word or go straight to hell, as the Zen masters put it.

Science (as opposed to and distinct from the academy) only works if it is pursued religiously, and if it doesn't work, it's a steaming pile. So likewise, I am all for reforming the safeguarding policies of the Catholic church, but if the priests don't keep the faith, there is nothing left, and the congregation will drift away to some conspiracy theory that brings them comfort.

We're both given to sort of peacocking, I think. We both do it, the OP was doing it, and I've responded by doing it. But how would you sum up the OP in a few sentences? — csalisbury

I'm not sure I can add much to your understanding.The op is a provocation rather than argument, along the lines you indicate, and directed at the usual suspects of post enlightenment thinking. (the clue's in the name). But for you, this is as formal as I can be bothered to make it.

P1. No good deed ever goes unpunished.
Therefore, virtue is sacrifice.

So the trolley thing is just a comment on the state of a certain form of consequentialism. What a feeble tale it is compared to Abraham and Issac on which to hang one's identity! Would you pull the lever or not? I really don't give a fuck if that's all life is about.

And of course, I am asking for help. Always I want to discuss what is beyond my reach; so as always I am frustrated by recitations of received wisdom. To be clear, I am not interested in Christianity at all, except in so far as it pollutes the environment, as it were. But I invite you to my funeral, and this is the hymn I have chosen


Why do we keep tying our children to the tracks? What's wrong with an altar and a knife?

But my own culture is what I speak from.
— unenlightened

Why do you have to talk from that? — The Opposite

Because it is alive in me. As alive as opposition is in you. It's difficult to talk about Aztec religion because it is not alive; it is not practiced. It is, therefore only brought into the conversation through the modernist Western scientific lens of archeology. So the multiculturalism is a pretence, and you speak from the same tradition as me.

This thread is too monocultural; Christianity doesn't even have a god of death - only evil. The Aztecs had a god of death who lived with his wife in a windowless house. — The Opposite

If you want to expound that cultural understanding, I am listening. But my own culture is what I speak from. But I suspect you are bullshitting and know not of what you speak.

As to Kierkegaard's argument that this story shows faith in its purest form, I don't get it. Abraham didn't have faith in God, he had empirical evidence of his existence — Hanover

From my position, I would say that either you or Kierkegaard has misunderstood the nature of faith. Empirical evidence is irrelevant to faith. My belief in justice is not increased by the discovery that it occasionally prevails, or decreased by the observation that it commonly does not.