Comments

  • How is Jordan Peterson viewed among philosophers?
    Peterson follows a long tradition of psychological and psychiatric support and defence of the status quo in its most authoritarian and controlling aspects. @Kenosha Kid has given chapter and verse on that, and I will simply locate his position in the context of the history of the discipline as the inheritor of the general line that complaint about social inequality is madness. The fascist left notoriously uses mental institutions as political prisons, but the 'democratic' version is no better.

    I hope that in the sober light of day you reread your post with the word "hysterical" in mind, both in terms of how often you use it, and in terms of the pitch of your post. — Kenosha Kid

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria

    Yes, you read aright, the cure of last resort for hysteria was hysterectomy.

    What had been drapetomania became depression. ... Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery.
    Thomas Szasz, "The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 346     — wiki

    I could go on, but I already have elsewhere, and simply wanted to put this discussion in the context of the political history of psychology and psychiatry. Madness is necessarily social, and necessarily delegitimising.
  • Coronavirus
    Lockdown has hardly changed my life at all. Am I lucky, or to be pitied?

    I am overcoming a lot of resentment — ArguingWAristotleTiff

    Resentment is highly contagious, but fortunately, dogs are immune. Knitting is also said to be therapeutic. Don't panic, Mum. I know its your job, but you can't expect perfection from a man.
  • What is the purpose/point of life?
    to learn, to teach, to love, and to be loved — Pfhorrest

    :up: That'll do. Life is for living, games are for playing.

    I feel my issues and lack of self worth or drive for more or better or happiness all stem from being young and thinking hard about death. — Mtl4life098

  • The Art of Being Right- By Arthur Schopenhauer
    Does he have a name for one of these?

    "If you think shit smells, you must think your nose is trying to poison you." A kissing cousin to a reductio.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Playing with dirt, when you grow up, you realize just makes you dirty. — tim wood

    Not at all. We grown-ups do it all the time; we call it 'cleaning', and it it is the foundation of civilisation. You know, like draining the swamp.
  • Fictionalism
    But anyhow I am not referring to pragmatic rules we chose to follow out of self interest but linguistic statements such as "You ought pay taxes" "Theft is wrong" "I own this house" "This is my country".

    This is about foundational premises before your start creating your society.     — Andrew4Handel

    I really don't understand how these are foundational or prior to a society? The notion of property and hence theft and tax developed out of agrarian societies. They make little sense to hunter/gatherer societies.

    But let me make another suggestion; that morality is founded on biology and environment. Large brain mandates early birth and under developed helpless neonates. The complex social relations of a tribe require that large brain to learn the particular adaptations of behaviour and social structure developed historically to exploit the local environment. This automatically produces a web of dependencies such that children need to learn food sources and environmental challenges, as well as the social expectations that will allow them to survive. Hunters need to cooperate, shelters need to be built cooperatively, and so on.

    The morality of intelligent turtles, that lay eggs on the beach and leave them to hatch and survive or not on their own, would be very different. Welfare services would not include child welfare.
  • Utopia and Dystopia: Human Entropies
    So the goal of going for a walk is to sit down, because every walk ends in a rest?
  • Fictionalism
    I think the apparent need for rules is an interesting point. Needing structure and rules does not mean these rules are not invented and without genuine force. — Andrew4Handel

    Try driving on the wrong side of the road and feel the genuine force.The idea that social pressure is unreal is as ridiculous as that it is unnecessary. A path is made by walking on it, something that sheep manage with no detectable entitlement. Habit and custom arise and establish themselves naturally, and entitlement is established in this way too; it is not a precondition of social organisation, nor is it anyone's invention. So far, I can see no radical distinction between the way a river course is established by a process of erosion, and the way a society is established and becomes regulated. Sometimes rivers flood and change course, and sometimes societies suffer revolutions. River courses are not fictional.
  • Communication is the manifestation of being
    I think I would generally prefer to call it "interaction".

    Thus your observation is a particular sort of interaction (with the world), and your posting about it is another kind of interaction, and our interaction of call and response is what i would properly like to call an attempt at 'communication'. The 'com' root in communication means 'with' - I think 'being with another being'.
  • What Is The Great Lesson Of The 20th Century?
    Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope. — Freewheelin' Franklin
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?

    Of course it will. reproduction demands a certain intimacy, and without reproduction, human life will of course come to an end. But the bad news is that we are not all total wankers, and enough of us will flout the rules to keep the population growing.
  • Fictionalism
    The point is that gravity will it impose itself on you but social structures are imposed by other people based on what appears to be false beliefs and not by regularities and restrictions found in nature. — Andrew4Handel

    It's a weak point and a largely false belief. Firstly, other people are as real as gravity, and secondly, social structures are almost invariably based on necessities of interdependence. Which side of the road we drive on is arbitrary, but that we all drive on the same side is a physical necessity just as implacable as gravity, and the situation is akin to a boulder balanced on a hill top that is bound to roll down one way or another.

    This forum has rules that are necessary to its being a place of discussion and not full of thoughtless rubbish. If you think they are based on false beliefs, try a site where they do not have them and compare.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle, to be fought over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up. — Tony Benn
  • Debate Discussion: "The content of belief is propositional".
    The tao that can be told
    is not the eternal Tao
    The name that can be named
    is not the eternal Name.

    The unnamable is the eternally real.
    Naming is the origin
    of all particular things.     — Lao Tzu

    You better believe it!
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    [
    So either this is true of Trump and Baden, or it’s not true of Trump and Baden? — Brett

    Yes. Which one?
  • Joe Biden (+General Biden/Harris Administration)
    I've just moved up the hill, and right now my head and the restore literally in the clouds. I will therefore fulminate against the enlightenment as the source of all your troubles. Normally I allow my moniker to express my rejection, but on this occasion, I make an exception. Reason and individuality. Des-bloody-cartes!

    Lauding reason as the operating principle, and the individual as the final end, enshrined a practical philosophy that objectified human society. Thus the unfeeling philosopher king institutes a mechanical view of the human and mechanises social relations. Man the cog in the social machine. Hence the production line, the mass exploitation of labour, slavery, the concentration camp all share a philosophical source and arise together. Not that there was not unpleasantness before, but dispassionate unpleasantness has no limit; it is never exhausted or sated.

    And this is the inheritance of the US from Europe and Britain in particular. Man as object is valued solely by the measure of wealth and power, and those with none have no value. So the US does not waste much money preserving the lives of the poor, with health services and welfare - the minimum to keep 'them' from organised riot. It is a miserable philosophy and a miserable country. The pain has not gone.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Well I guess it’s all over for the forum then if this is how the administrator behaves. — Brett

    I guess it's all over for the US if this is how the president behaves.
  • The self
    Let us now praise non-existent things. Like the building the architect has drawn, that the builder has not yet built and that the planner may never allow. Like meta-ethics, like the self. "Non-being is such...", say I, presupposing being also.

    "In the beginning was the word..." but the beginning is the beginning of the self - self is time.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    But there aren't really two kinds of people. — Kenosha Kid

    No, there aren't. But there are two directions one can be going as a person - upwards or downwards. Everyone is swimming or sinking. And to anyone who is sinking, it is great to hear that that way lies salvation. I think that is always the appeal of the demagogue, to the basest instincts, flattering the weak that they are strong rather than challenging them to become stronger, and so on.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Let me rephrase, as I'm not expressing myself well. I know Trump thought his supporters to be fools. He said as much when he said he could shoot a randomer in the street and they would excuse it. I understand his awfulness; I don't understand why, hearing him say that, they agreed. — Kenosha Kid

    I am a greedy, lazy, dishonest miserable, angry, self-centred, racist, sexist loser. Trump represents me; he tells me he is like me, and is on my side, he makes like we are the virtuous people and anyone who supports minorities and women and children is a whining communist who wants to stop us being good old American assholes.
  • Disasters and Beyond: Where Are We Going?
    I suggest that what we are facing in biblical terms is very much a Tower of Babel situation, not apocalypse or judgement day; it's a breakdown of communication. I think it is a psychological defence; communication has become too fast, too universal and ego becomes swamped, and takes refuge from the engulfing mass of others in a fantasy world. In this condition, the majority votes for there not being a problem, and that makes problems unresolvable.

    But actually, the modern science based civilisation has responded rather well to the pandemic, on average. People have changed their behaviour a good deal in a short time, politicians have deployed the war metaphors, and most of us have learned to manage without professional haircuts and foreign holidays. Which is to say that people in general adapt very quickly, but governments do not.

    It has never been the case that survival skills were solitary skills. Social animals are social for their survival and cannot survive as isolated individuals, and it is this simple truth that has been somewhat suppressed by consumer capitalism to the extent that one right wing leader famously claimed 'there is no such thing as society'.

    But of course we depend on each other and always have. There is no going back to the good old days when everyone could knapp their own flint - they never could. And it is communication that lifts the social mentality from the herd mentality. We have had a century of lies and propaganda becoming more prevalent and have almost reached the point where government has become unbelievable which entails that people become ungovernable. People do what they are told to the extent they trust what they are told. The economy runs on trust and good faith - another term of abuse, 'faith' - but call it 'confidence', and it is what preserves the value of money and the whole economy.

    It is easily seen that Covid presents a mere inconvenience to those countries that have the good governance to respond effectively, and that populism is the worst performer, because it relies on fantasies of heroes and so on. Climate change is much more of a problem, but again, if we know the truth, and we know what we have to do, and we organise, it is still resolvable.
  • Fictionalism
    I thought that the point of a physical law was that you could not break it because no exceptions to the rule have been found so it is self enforcing. — Andrew4Handel

    I think most physical laws are statistical based. Water is always liquid except when it it freezes or boils. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, except radioactivity.

    I don't think you can necessarily give an objective description of social structures and norms.
    So someone may say tax laws are there for the equal redistribution of wealth and schools intend to enlighten people.     — Andrew4Handel

    Well I don't know what gravity is for either. Taxes are government collecting money from people. Schools are collective child-minding facilities. Gravity is stuff tending to fall down, law is societies regulate their relations.
  • Fictionalism
    I am a supporter of the fictionalist position. This means I believe that other than possible physical laws found in the natural sciences that other laws, norms beliefs and social structures are fictions (possibly useful fictions) — Andrew4Handel

    I think science claims that its laws are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Do you think one could regard social rules in the same way? "This is how banks, courts, neighbourhoods function, and this is how those things fall apart..."
  • I am looking for a parable that tells about a tyrant and an honest poor man
    It could be a Sufi tale. One of the many about Mullah Nasruddin?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Pro-Trump Lawyer Lin Wood Said He 'Might Actually Be' Second Coming of Christ — Pfhorrest

    I'm buying.

    All together now, "Crucify him, crucify him!"
  • Debate Discussion: "The content of belief is propositional".
    ↪Harry Hindu
    ↪Kenosha Kid


    Do either of you dispute my claim that the logic of propositions is not the same as the logic of commands?

    Either way, arguing about the trivial illustrative example I offered is irrelevant.
  • Introducing the philosophy of radical temporality
    Don Bannister’s discovery of Kelly’s work and his importation of it into Britain was a game changer for a whole
    generation of psychologists who felt utterly stifled by the stranglehold positivism had on the British psychological scene in the 1950’s.     — Joshs

    Not much had changed by the end of the 60's when I was studying. Kelly appeared briefly in the undergraduate curriculum, Laing, Janov, Rogers, were far too revolutionary and only to be studied by torchlight under the bedcovers in secret.

    Speaking of Janov and Rogers, have you come across The Feeling therapy Centre? What is it about psychology that makes it so prone to horror? Their first book, by the way, might be of interest to you, if only as a warning against hubris.
  • Introducing the philosophy of radical temporality
    I'm mainly following along quietly, but I did play a little with Kelly's personal construct theory and the construction and analysis of repertory grids back in the day.

    Some psychologists have suggested that PCT is not a psychological theory but a metatheory because it is a theory about theories. — wiki

    I think it is more interesting than that. It proposes psychology as a literally self constructing discipline. The psyche develops as a psychological understanding of social relations - of self and (m)other. It is a meta theory but it is also a psychological theory in its own right that constructs itself as man-the-psychologist. This makes it radically anti-authoritarian; 'we are all psychologists' is an empowering mantra that does not impose itself as the only way to understand people but suggests instead that perhaps the understanding one already has of oneself and others can be enriched ... But alas it does not lend itself to social manipulation, and so is not politically or financially expedient.
  • The perfect question
  • Inner Space: Finding Reality?
    I do find that sometimes I can begin to voyage into inner space. It seems to me that this dimensions of experience is so different from experience in the external world. — Jack Cummins

    Shall we call it subjectivity? It is dubious ground you voyage to. One can declare it the source of all meaning and the answer to 'why?' , and another declare it fantasy, solipsism and madness. There seems to be no authority, no settlement to be reached.

    Or is it the case, and it is just a suggestion, that what is agreeable, what can be settled, and indubitable, is that exact emptiness, groundlessness, and silence, that is the answer to all the 'whys'? That in the end, whatever might be held to be the content substance and furniture of the inner world is indeed fantasy and nonsense, and as one enters the void, the void enters the world as oneself. And the cessation of thought, and the ending of identification is the emptiness that leaves room for something new, and that is freedom.

    Beware though of materialised subjectivities.
  • Inner Space: Finding Reality?
    Can you articulate at all what is the distinction between inner and outer? It is one of those things that seem so obvious until one tries to specify... I am sympathetic to the idea, but then it sometimes seems as if it is, contrariwise, the concern with 'Boredom, Anxiety and Freedom,' that is the problem of the modern.
  • Debate Discussion: "The content of belief is propositional".
    An artificial neural network can have the nameless anticipation (surge in action potentials). Oughtn't we reserve "belief" for the anticipations of a more restricted class of machines? — bongo fury

    The thought police are a bit premature here. the legislation has not been passed, and the ten commandments do not specify. No we ought not.
  • Debate Discussion: "The content of belief is propositional".
    Being able to ride a bike involves being able to to do whatever it is one has to do to ride and remain upright. I believe I can do whatever it takes ...

    I believe whatever.

    "All beliefs are statements in our minds" so Creativesoul tries to dismantle that. But it's more like "All beliefs can be put into a statement". — khaled

    This is the difference between them. "I believe that the ground will not swallow me up when i step through the front door." is a belief that can be expressed as a proposition (as can be seen), but not a statement that anyone has in mind except when doing philosophy. I have it in mind that the cat believes there is a mouse behind the skirting board hole, but there are no statements in the cat's mind, but a nameless anticipation.

    In order to express a belief as a statement, one needs to believe that the words exist and have meaning.
    How does one arrive at the belief that "'mummy' means something", at that beginning age when one does not yet believe that 'means something' means anything? The first word is necessarily a complex of beliefs in communication that cannot yet be stated. Language developed as a set of beliefs and practices that did not start with the expression of those linguistic beliefs.
  • A thought experiment in reality
    This happens to me all the time. I've woken up to the realisation that i have been dreaming so many times now that I take it completely in my stride, and just get on with the new reality as best I can. I thought this was normal?
  • QUANTA Article on Claude Shannon
    And what I say three times is true. — The Bellman
    (The Hunting of the Snark)

    Context approximately equals language game, approximately equals background knowledge/prior agreement/protocol/ etc etc.

    Shannon's context is information transfer: I post - you read. We are used to a faithfully exact transfer; that what you read is exactly what I wrote, complete with typos. We are used in this context, to the elimination of noise. And this is done by the application of Shannon's theory.

    But if one downloads a large app, one generally 'verifies' it because there is always some noise and thus the possibility of a 'wrong' bit. Verification uses redundancy to (hopefully) eliminate noise. And the Bellman does the same thing. Saying everything three times is very redundant, but reduces 'noise' if one compares the three versions and takes the average. A checksum does some of the job at much less informational cost, in the sense that if the checksum matches the probability of error is vanishingly small, but if it fails to match, there is no way to correct, but one must begin again.

    Good writing somewhat tends to follow the Bellman's method; the introduction sets out what it to be said, the body of the piece says it, and the conclusion says what has been said. Redundancy is somewhat misnamed, because it helps reduce misunderstanding.

    So, now imagine as analogy to the rain in the Sahara an array of 100 * 100 pixels - black or white, 0 or1.

    There are 2^10,000 possible pictures. That is a large number. But now consider the Saharan version, where we know that almost all the pixels are black, or 0. Obviously, one does not bother to specify all the dry days in the Sahara, one gives the date of the exceptional wet day, and says, "else dry".

    In the same way, any regularity that might predominate, stripes, chequerboards or whatever, can be specified and then any deviations noted. This is called compression, and is the elimination of redundancy. The elimination of redundancy is equivalent to the elimination of order. Maximum compression results in a message that is maximally disordered and thus looks exactly like noise.

    This then explains the rather counter-intuitive finding that disordered systems contain more information than ordered systems and thus that entropy reduces available energy but increases information. One proceeds from the simple 'sun hot, everything else cold', to a much more complex, but essentially dull 'lukewarm heat death of everything'.
  • Debate Discussion: "The content of belief is propositional".
    ↪Pfhorrest
    Do be careful with computational logic. It doesn't work the same as propositional logic, because instructions are not statements. "A= A+1" Contradiction as statement, simple commonplace instruction.
  • Definitions of Beauty
    Yes.
  • Problems of modern Science
    I think that "will power" refers specifically to the capacity to prevent oneself from acting in a situation where the person is inclined to act. — Metaphysician Undercover

    I have never been able to make any sense of the notion, myself. Whence cometh this mysterious power? Given there is a shortage, how can the supply be augmented?
  • Can we keep a sense of humour, despite serious philosophy problems?
    Hey guys, my mum is long dead and my wife has to keep my philosophy in bounds. But I still get over-excited about things. Go talk to the trees when it gets too much. Better still, listen to them. they are older and wiser.

    one of my tutors told me that rationality was my dominant mode, and emotions as the inferior ones — Jack Cummins

    He was wrong. But then bullshit is the dominant mode of most art therapists. Get him to do your portrait if you want to learn about yourself.

    The excitement of philosophy is that not only is your whole future at stake, but also your past, your family, your most fundamental beliefs and your eternal soul if any. Wives, mothers and therapists will just have to get used to it; philosophers never will.

    Have some lyrics. https://genius.com/The-incredible-string-band-puppet-song-lyrics

    Better still, have the song - explains everything.

  • Problems of modern Science
    Well I’m glad for you but when I proposed something not unlike what you just said, you said it was ineffective... — Olivier5

    I'm not proposing anything, I'm doing autobiography, in response to you claiming "Waiting, at this point, means accepting doom as necessary or unavoidable." when I said "I propose first of all to point out that it is a problem of humanity, and a problem that science and reason cannot deal with.

    And then I will wait until all the proposals run into the sand."

    I am not proposing that you or anyone should do what I have been doing for fifty years, merely mentioning something it. It is as if the arguments I have bothered to make have passed you by completely, and we are reduced to some virtue competition. Carry on proposing if it floats your boat.
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