Did "concerned" (heck, or "caring") go out of fashion? — jorndoe

I'm happy to claim "alarmist", as I am being battered by another storm, and the first official 'red warning' for a long time. If you look at a few economic commentators, you will see that every major economy is in trouble. While one can blame the oligarchs to an extent, one of the reasons that disaster capitalism is taking over the world is that disaster is taking over the world. We are getting poorer, because our stuff is burning, being blown down, washed away, drying out, etc. The rich can still make money from our desperation...

I often think it's comical – Fal, lal, la!
How Nature always does contrive – Fal, lal, la!
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
Fal, lal, la!

Gilbert and Sullivan, Iolanthe.

How the mind loves to classify, and no mind more so than the philosopher's! And if something, or someone does not fit neatly into the compartments one has, then a new compartment must be created, named, and defined. And for many, perhaps most, the classification of a philosophy or philosopher counts as a sufficient understanding thereof. Hence the proliferation of names of 'isms.

Processism: a philosophy characterised by the prioritising of 'happens' over 'is'; of event over object; of doing over being. Now I can relax! I still know everything!

You are so very stupid, you cannot read your own evidence. I cannot help you.

Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

The left hand of Taoism is Confucianism. Confucianism is conservative, traditional, hierarchical, rule-based, legalistic. It is very much a moral code for the proper functioning of human society. This other hand is dominant in Chinese culture, because it supports the culture.

The Taoist is always a maverick, an individualist, a gypsy, a wanderer in the wilderness not a cultivator of the rice paddy.

As I understand it, Taoism does avoid a human-centered morality. — T Clark

That is my understanding also. But it does not deny it, but offers the 'other hand'. The two work together.

What others teach, I also teach; that is:
"A violent man will die a violent death!"
This will be the essence of my teaching. — Tao Te Ching

_________________________________________________

Argument about God, god, gods, and the supernatural seem out of place to me in relation to Taoism. The supernatural pervades Chinese culture; the Confucian will emphasise the sacred Emperor, and the respect and duty due to the ancestors; the Taoist's supernatural tends more to the magical prediction, spells, charms, blessings. But neither is central to the respective thought system.

To get a better idea of Gods, dragons, and other monsters, have a read, or watch the cartoon of Monkey - Journey to the West.

I have been banging on for ages about sea level rise as a major factor that will affect us, and in the first video, Father Christmas on his day off explains how sea level rise is likely to be exponential, and how when you are on an exponential curve, if you look back, things seem to be changing gradually, but when you look forwards, you are facing a wall of abrupt change. His topic is the North polar region and Greenland as you would expect from Santa. Santa suggests you cut back on the meat a bit.



So for some balance, here is my favourite doom-merchant showing an ongoing collapse of sea ice in the Antarctic that you can follow live via links in the description on youtube.

I think trying to label people as some definite type usually backfires. Just because something is greyish doesn't mean it's not bad. Musk probably isn't a Nazi, but he's a naive moron who buys into ideological stuff that suits his personal beliefs. So when a far-right party in some other nation says something he agrees with, it's not that they're composed of former or present nazis, it's because they align in their current policies with what he agrees with. — Christoffer

Amen to that, and it's probably not worth arguing the exact definition of our insults as if there is a precise and important distinction between far-right, fascist, and nazi.

Hard to think they're Nazis. — AmadeusD

I don't think it is actually. Not that I know anything about them but a violent criminal gang that uses Heil Hitler, passes my test with flying colours. Surely they don't have to be white?

But folks get called 'communist' without having joined the party; anyway, I'll stick with "cockwomble" myself and recognise an enemy of society, whatever the currently politically correct label.

People have been saying silly things and getting predictions wrong for as long as they have been talking. But to do it deliberately, as you do, is fortunately much rarer, though I have the impression it is becoming normalised of late.

(one of hte claims tacitly supported is that someone with Bi-polar doesn't do what Elon did - therefore it's a Nazi salute. — AmadeusD

That makes no sense. But what makes some sense is the connection drawn between ex nazis in various organisations that Musk has associated himself with and blatant sympathisers he has openly supported. If it quacks like a nazi, and nests with nazis, and twaddles like a nazi, maybe it's a nazi.

Having said that, I'm not entirely sure I agree with myself. This discussion at least starts to make a case for the other side.

—

Is anyone here prepared to claim Elon Musk made a Nazi salute? — AmadeusD

I don't think he is smart enough to be that fluent in such symbolic gesturing. My guess is that he was going for hand on heart sincerity and this, and missing by a country mile. What an enormous cockwomble though!

It rather plays to the general distraction though to have missed the far more significant alignment of all the American tech and media oligarchs behind the inauguration, and the immediate announcement of the "Stargate" project.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, here are a couple of grownups talking about international affairs and stuff.

Climate-change/global-warming alarmists have been scaremongering and warning of impending doom for well over 100 years. Like most doomsday cults, when the predicted disaster doesn't happen when it was predicted they just shift the date of disaster to some time in the future. — Agree-to-Disagree

"The effect may be considerablein a few centuries."

Come back in another century and sneer about failed doomsday cults. :roll:

l You might like to explore this site a little...
https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/ideologies/

...the age of nationalism powerfully promoted the conviction that the war experience fulfilled the task of “rejuvenating and regenerating a civilization now in steep decline.” The bellicose “mood” that resulted had by 1914 become an essential factor in the origins of the First World War. In Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and London, a “storm of war feeling broke.”

The assumption took hold on segments of the collective mythopoeia that destroying a contemptible society would “open the way to a better one.” Within this mindset, the brief bout of ruthless slaughter of the enemy this demanded was perceived as a ritual act of purification; a “cleansing fire.”

The West marched joyfully into mental catacombs of its own making. It would only emerge from them in 1945—after over 70 million combatants and civilians had died as a direct result of war, persecution, or genocide—a mere fraction of the survivors whose lives were devastated.

As prospects of a short war evaporated and the death toll grew ever higher, powerful psychological processes ensured that the war would remain for millions a catalyst to experiencing transcendence. It was as if the fantasy of redemption through sacrifice—stubbornly entertained by both the fighters and onlookers—was fuelled rather than quenched by the blood of the fallen, like pouring oil on flames.

https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2014/2014-11-11-Griffin.htm

When this came out, I wasn't expecting to get this old. But here I am. And feeling the exact same way about things. That's a hopeful sign, right? "Let's face the music, and dance."

Are you familiar with Pentangle? Best Hippie Rock band to ever exist. — Arcane Sandwich

Well now you are in my happy hunting ground - folk and folk rock. So i can correct you here; the best band ever was the Albion Band.





And in case you like hard core folk:— I used to play some of these tunes on mandolin, a long time ago, in another part of the forest.

That's surprisingly musical. My ignorance of the genre is profound but listening to that dragged this from memory vault of forbidden youth.



Oh and speaking of well kept secrets this was in the dark recesses of the record collection back then:

Have we had this one? Janis Ian. "At Seventeen"

I dunno nothin about metal, but even country folk hate country:

Civil war? How you doing over there, these days?

Here's the thing: this has actually happened already. Eventually, all of the cells of our bodies, even all of our atoms, get replaced by new ones. In that sense, we're like the Ship of Theseus. — Arcane Sandwich

That was my first thought, and then it occurred to me that it also happens that the brain is slowly removed and not replaced, and that is called dementia, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, and the like. And far into the process, it seems as if one is still perfectly conscious, even though one has lost one's history, one's habits, one's personality, and one's relationships.

Almost as if every brain were either an Adam or an Eve computing machine and fundamentally identical except in the programming and memory, and consciousness is part of the sameness, not part of the individuality.

It actually inspired in me a new way of looking at quantum mechanics. I would get into it right now, but unfortunately, at the moment, i don't have the time. Perhaps i will at some point in the future. — punos

Cool! The tendency is usually to try to back-project distinctions we make, like that between physics and metaphysics, onto the writing of the ancients, rather than trying to understand how they would project their distinctions -perhaps between heaven and earth, forwards, and the effect of this is that though one calls the result "The Tao of Physics" it is actually more so "The Physics of the Tao.". One praises them for 'guessing right'.

Sartre's unique contribution to the philosophy of consciousness is that it is always what it is not. — Moliere

You'd have to give some details to be sure, but it sounds from that as if Sartre is confusing identity with consciousness, and identity is very much the thought that conflates itself with consciousness. I quite like Sartre, but the suggestion that he might be aligned with Krishnamurti seems almost ludicrous. Sartre's still playing goodies and baddies, even if he asserts that he is making it up like everyone else.

One more, and this time with a lying acceptable image.

I just discovered this man who sings almost like a woman, who was so badly treated by the music industry for most of his life, but liked and respected by some great musicians. So here is another moving performance and a snippet of interview at the end. Apparently he had some unusual hormonal problem that resulted in him never going through puberty completely, and that makes him a threat and an abomination to the rigid thinkers of identity. But you can hear his big big heart...

I prefer The Tao of Pooh.

With humans, you give them food, and they give you shit in return. But with plants, or at least some plants, it's the other way round.

So first become a gardener, and learn to love nature, and when you love shit because it feeds your plants, you can love another human.

Those who want to relate the Tao to either physics or information or logos, might do well to look for those connections in the much older book, the I Ching. And for anyone interested it provides a cultural background that can help understanding.

It is however, difficult and in some ways more like a pack of tarot cards than a work of science or philosophy. But without having to accept the woo, there is still a background of the attempt to make fundamental binary distinctions that in combination can form a way of understanding the universe and man's place in it, beginning with Yin and Yang. And that distinction is even echoed in Mao Tse Tung's comment that 'women hold up half the sky'.

Jung's Introduction to the English translation to Wilhelm's German translation is as gentle an introduction as I can think of.

Or jump head first into the complexity.

World Economic Forum Report.

What the rich are worried about.



https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2025/

So we cannot be aware of awareness.... at least insofar that awareness is thought?

Is there a non-thought awareness of awareness? — Moliere

I think (awareness is always aware of being aware).

I have basically stolen the notion from J. Krishnamurti, that thought is nothing much to do with awareness. If awareness is considered as 'presence' to the world, it surely becomes clear that thought is secondary, subsequent, and thus always operating on the past as memory. The awareness that can be put into thought and thought about is not awareness but thought.

I want to, or you want me to, talk about life— but talk is dead; thought is mechanical. And this is the hardest lesson for western philosophy and western culture by which I mean to include both Christianity and science (the twins). The heart of things cannot be touched by thought, cannot be understood by thought, and all that AI does is to expose how dead and mechanical we have become, that we mistake our lives for that endless talk that clouds it.

The space between heaven and Earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the centre. — Tao Te Ching: 5

How does one hold fast to that which always moves and yields? Hush. Do not say it, find out.

I'd like to join in the mutual appreciations; I've got a deal of reading up to do, and things to think about, and thanks for that. I would have been a bit more forthcoming maybe, but I had a seizure on Boxing day and have been in hospital for tests and scans and then on anti fitting drugs and painkillers for a severe backache.
So I can say from immediate experience that I am not my brain, because my brain is going its own way and doing stuff that I definitely do not approve of, and my body likewise. But I am reading along more or less, and I'll just make a vague comment, somewhat related to this:

Would you say that human experience is a thing-in-itself?
— Moliere

No, I would not. It's in-itself, sure, but it's not a thing in the technical sense. Human experience is not a res. Human experience is more like cogitans in that sense. I would say: there is a human (a res) that has human experiences (cogitans). In other words, we shouldn't think that the cogitans is purely "mental" or "rational", since it is also empirical. — Arcane Sandwich

I find the term 'experience' too ambiguous for the job it has to do here, so I will substitute—

Would you say that human awareness is a thing-in-itself?

And my answer is an emphatic 'yes'. It is the thing in itself; the noumenon into which all phenomena fall. Awareness is like the black hole at the centre of the galaxy, it is the unexperienced source and destination of all experience. Thought cannot touch it, cannot grasp it cannot know it. The confusion of the mechanical process of thought with the silence that is aware of thought and everything else, Is I suspect, the heart of most philosophical difficulties.

So personal identity, then, is the confabulation thought creates in the attempt to stabilise itself as the narrative thread on which identity is built. In the superficial physical world, there are the facts of name, age, medical history, posting history, etc, etc, that is substantially true of a physical body and brain, but that is all merely phenomenal; of the thing in itself, of that which I am and you are, nothing whatsoever can be said.

So, does a stone have an identity? Mu!

Yeah. It's interesting that there is great scepticism of quantum effects in biology, and yet getting them into our phones is a realistic goal.

Hook me up. I want one implanted in my brain.
I wonder if that's how those monarch butterflies find that spot in Mexico. — Metaphysician Undercover

Microtubules. Of course.

A stone has an identity — Arcane Sandwich

It is what it is. If that is all you mean, we have no disagreement. But to say it has something seems to hint at more... ?

Is it something like "Dream big, you can be whatever it is that you want to be"? Or is it instead something like "Reality Itself bends to our mere will, so that with a mere though you can instantly become a different creature, such that you have gills simply because you think so, and you can actually breathe underwater because you think you can". — Arcane Sandwich

Well my ontology is that identity is a thought process and nothing else. To be hard-nosed for a minute, no fish ever thinks it is a fish, it does not identify itself at all, and therefore has no identity. Humans identify stuff including themselves and each other. Reality doesn't bend, it flows. Dreams remain dreams unless they are realised, just as as an architect's plans are fantasies until and unless a builder makes them a reality. Now we can argue about whether an architect whose plans are never built is a "real" architect or not, but identities as fantasies certainly have potential.

I can think that I am a fish. That doesn't mean that I am a fish. — Arcane Sandwich

Well that is a question of identity politics. Some people like to lay down the law about what are legitimate identities, but the recognised identities do seem to change over time and between cultures to an extent at least. Who knows if gill reassignment will or won't become an option?

Humans and hurricanes have something in common: both of them are event-based objects, in Carmichael's (2015) sense of the term. — Arcane Sandwich

Or to put it another way, they are both temporary, mutable, evolving objects. I'm all for a bit of common sense now and then. And depending on the time-scale, mountains continents and pretty much every object is temporary, mutable and evolving.

∃x(Cxm ∧ Bxt) - There exist an x, such that x was a caterpillar on Monday, and it is a butterfly on Tuesday. You just need to treat Monday and Tuesday as individual constants, and "being a caterpillar" and "being a butterfly" as two-place predicates that relate an individual to a moment in time. — Arcane Sandwich

Of course, one can account for these things, but in general, logic is mainly conducted in the present eternal tense, as it has been in this thread, and that is the practice I am criticising

I am unenlightened, but tomorrow I will be enlightened. No problem, but will anyone want to say that unenlightened is enlightened, even if they are willing to say tomorrow that enlightened was unenlightened. It can be made to work, but it isn't without difficulties.

Ok, this isn't a backroad, it's the cutting edge of the superhighway to the future. This is highly recommended as a great explanation of theoretical and practical quantum physics and if you don't think you learn anything from watching it, I will personally give you your time back.

I was trying to clarify rather than equivocate, but obviously you seem to be unenlightened on the semantics. — Corvus

Oh ha ha! You made a little joke about my handle! No one ever did that before; I should have thought about that when I chose the label.

Descartes famously said Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. — Arcane Sandwich

I think therefore I am whatever I think. I am the thought of myself. I am the result of the distinction I make between myself and the world. But this is obviously wrong. I am, therefore, whatever I mistake myself for.

But in being someone, I am something. I am something in the following sense:

∃x(x=a) - There exists an x, such that x is identical to Arcane Sandwich. — Arcane Sandwich

Will you say, "There exists an x, such that x is identical to a named hurricane."? We talk about them as objects for convenience, but we do not draw the boundaries or wonder where they go when they dissipate. The problem with formal logic is that it cannot deal with time.
Yesterday, there existed an x, such that was identical to unenlightened.
Today, there exists a y, such that y is now identical to unenlightened, but somewhat changed from x.
Tomorrow, who knows, there may exist a z such that z is then identical to the mortal remains of unenlightened, but is radically different from x and y in being lifeless. Or maybe z will be enlightened. :joke:

We can't record it really, and the defense of poetics falls to the same narcissism as the defense of science.

Yeah? Or naw? — Moliere

Yeah.
"The record that can be recorded is not the continuing record."
"Work is done and then forgotten; therefore it lasts forever."
ETC.