These evolutionists' main business has been to show how conduct which does not benefit the agent can survive in evolution by benefiting his kin; they have worked out the arithmetic of 'kin-selection'. This way of thinking actually makes any dependence on individual selfishness as a motive unnecessary, and the term 'selfish' should not appear in their writings. For some reason, however, they are still devoted to it. Even the least romantic of them, W. D. Hamilton, has a paper called 'Geometry for the Selfish Herd', and Wilson takes enormous pains to show that a great range of obviously uncalculated altruistic human behaviour, such as impulsive rescuing, is really bargaining, and therefore concealed selfishness. They show a strong and unexamined tendency to assume both that individual I motivation must actually, despite appearances, be selfish, and that it makes i sense to talk of entities other than individuals as being selfish. R. S. Trivers, I closely followed by Dawkins, has inflated this bad habit into a mythology. — Midgeley

my emphasis.

It's clear her target is the supposed science being popularised as well as the populariser himself. and the unexamined assumption is that selfishness requires no explanation because it is metaphorically literally built into the genes.

In fairness to Dorkinch, he does acknowledge in the introduction that the selfish gene thing is a metaphor. But in fairness to Mary, he forgets that completely in the body of the book and takes himself literally.

Care to explain, or just saying it's nonsense? How about forming an argument? — bizso09

No. Just saying. That's the thing about nonsense, it's not amenable to argument. I'll just mention that to talk of 'the you' is precisely to reify and objectify subjectivity. I'm very happy to be stupid for you.

There's a bit where the guy is playing with his tiles, and points out 2 positions that can have alternative tiles, but once one is chosen, there is no choice for the other if the plane is going to be tiled.

There are infinite ways to tile the plane with Penrose tiles, but the finite amount that one can see, or that one has already placed, is insufficient to determine the plane. And it occurs to me that one can regard the tiles already placed as the past, the edge as the present, and the un-layed area as the future. The past does not entirely determine the future (as it would in a periodic tiling), but it constrains it quite tightly.

Sufficiently tightly to produce a geometrical equivalence to entanglement between two 'tile events' that are widely separated.

I am not clever enough to work out if this is just a fun analogy, or there is some real connection such that particle entanglement implies indeterminacy (working it all backwards as it were).

The You is a subjective subjectivity. — bizso09

There we have it. Authentic nonsense on stilts.

Should we respect someone's right to vote if their motivations for voting are to take away the rights of others? — coolguy8472

I would be so respectful as to reciprocate, and seek to remove their right to vote. Such people deserve to be taken seriously.

How much is one's life dependant on another? — whippet101

Divest yourself of everything produced by another, and you will find out - briefly.

Don't limit yourselves to National flags.

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/asafo-flags-fante-people-misc-110918

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Political_flags

why should anyone else pay even one nickel because you deliberately, ignorantly, and stupidly chose to be stupid? — tim wood

Because everyone is sometimes deliberately, ignorantly, and stupidly stupid sometimes, although it is hard to think how one can be deliberately stupid and ignorantly stupid about the same thing at the same time. And also because sensibly sensible people have the sense to pay for there not to be rotting corpses littering the streets - even the corpses of stupidly stupid people become a health hazard and lower real-estate values.

But reality is subjective. — bizso09

Is it objectively subjective, or is it merely subjectively subjective?

I would wish that my posts are always of some use to someone.

I will never make another post on this thread.

When one cannot even express the notion that 'never' is useless, without using the term, it is a strong indication that one's thinking is off course. May there always be sandpaper for all your rough spots.

The problem I see is with consent — Punshhh

whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. — Goering

Sorry, do you mean talking about my experiences in life is preaching? — KerimF

Have you had some experiences? Did you talk about them?

I am afraid — KerimF

Wiki might be wrong, but are you saying it is not a religion, or that it is based on rules other than it is claimed, or that in practice adherents behave consistently?

To put it another way, it looks as though you are asking a rhetorical question to which you think you have the answer already. Which is a recipe not for a discussion but for preaching. Preaching is not philosophy.

no one they encounter can justifiably deny or oppose said beliefs — Benj96

It is alas the case that folks can and do unjustifiably oppose anything and everything that is inconvenient to them. (You cannot justifiably oppose this sad fact). This means that the rationality and presumable honesty and truthfulness that you propose does not amount to a super-power that puts one in charge of everyone. They might have some influence; they might make the world a little bit better, but mostly they will be ignored or persecuted. See Socrates, see Jesus, etc.

Blessed are the banned in spirit, for they shall sell God.

Why the fuck would anyone bother with your depressing meaningless drivel when they can have their own meaningless but less depressing drivel. Enjoy your meaningless sense of superiority on your own and stop inflicting it on the rest of us.

Have you guys looked at personal construct theory at all. It's a bit meta, in that it supposes that everyone has some kind of classification scheme by which they understand their fellows, and sets out to discover how simple or complex, how vague or precise, consistent, how many dimensions it has and so on. In short, it's a psychology of man the psychologist.

Maybe the point is to look within and see for oneself, rather than accept any concept based only on theory — Yohan

That sounds good to me. Mind you, I'm unenlightened.

But if I meet another structure exactly like mine, but composed of different particles, I would be me and not them. — Yohan

:rofl: You both would say the same, who should I believe? But there can be no such exactitude because there must necessarily be a different relation to the world - you could not both be in each other's shadow for example.

Sounds like what we are talking about is the IDEA of self, rather than an essential identity. Which, depending on what we mean by identity, there may not be one. — Yohan

Sure. Let me know when you've made up your mind which you want to discuss.

My song is love unknown,
My Savior's love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I,
That for my sake
My Lord should take
Frail flesh, and die? — Samuel Crossman

Alas for those who are satisfied with the known.

Am I merely a relationship of particles or am I a person? — Yohan

I am saying that a person is all relationship. we know for instance hat all the particles of the body are replaced over a few years by new particles. So what is maintained the same over years is the structure, the arrangement of changing substances.

Is reality just a complex relationship of "stuff"? Or is reality some kind of meaningful relationship? — Yohan

What's with the 'just' and 'merely'? Stuff is just stuff, merely stuff. Relations, arrangements, structures, are meaningful. just meaningful, merely meaningful.

To quibble, Jesus was a socialist. A communist would not have said "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's". — Hippyhead

To counter-quibble, he went on, "and unto God that which is God's." And in the light of the parable under discussion, what belongs to Caesar is his image in gold - everything else is God's. Give Caesar back all his gold, and it becomes a big pile of soft metal. God's currency is life itself, and Caesar's power is just a social construct, that will 'wither away'.

What do you mean by 'stuff'? Do you mean particles of matter/energy? Because isn't everything besides particles of matter/energy relationships between participles of matter/energy? (That is within metaphysical materialism). — Yohan

I try to be as vague as possible, but someone has to ask. Really, trot along to a physics forum, and when you find out what stuff is, come and explain it to me. I suppose if E = mc^2 and energy is activity, then it seems that stuff is pure active relation of emptiness to strings or quarks or fuck knows.

But I don't have to care about that. For the convenience of human understanding, light and matter is stuff.

Wouldn't then the definition of the world be "The collection of all particles of matter/energy"?

Absolutely not. It's the relations that matter, not the matter itself. Music is just vibrations in the air you think? No, I say, that's noise; music is vibrations in a relationship.

Does that mean that in fact You is globally unique — bizso09

Yes. Once 'you' has been stripped of particularity, and isolated from physicality and mentality,

I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together — Lennon,Mccartney

But my Cosmology is simpler:

P1. There is stuff.
P2. Stuff is related.
P3. Relations are not more stuff.

P3 explicitly forbids talk of "obj 1, 2, 3, and people A,B,C", because people are relations not more stuff.
One talks of three ducks in a row, not three ducks and a row. Thus a person is the (active) relation of a human body to the world, in the same way that 'a row' is the relation of the ducks to each other.

There is no need to wonder 'what happens to the row' when one duck moves sideways - the relation is changed from a row to a triangle; and when a human body dies, its relation to the world changes from active to passive.

Finally, 'you', and 'I' are the relations between two relations between two bodies and the the world, such that You are your I and I am your you. This is just like the fact that whenever the cat is on the mat, the mat is under the cat.

Myriad people are wearing masks and observing social distancing &c., simply to avoid persecution from strangers who have gone all in on pandemic panic. — Merkwurdichliebe

I wear pants for the same reason. Damn fascist prudes infringing my right to hang loose!

Jesus is a communist. From each according to their ability to each according to their needs. Everyone needs to eat, whether they work all day or half a day.

Complete description of what? — Srap Tasmaner

Of interpretation; of meaning; of the way language works.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. You spotted a mistake that resulted in something that is either a contradiction or just nonsense. But if one reads the passage out of context - without already knowing the direction of the paper, then one could not tell whether it was the underlined words that needed to be swapped, or the previous occurrences, thus:

Someone who grasps the fact that Mrs Malaprop means ‘epithet’ when she says ‘epitaph’ must give ‘epithet’ all the powers ‘epitaph’ has for many other people. Only a full recursive theory can do justice to these powers. These remarks do not depend on supposing Mrs Malaprop will always make this ‘mistake’; once is enough to summon up a passing theory assigning a new role to ‘epitaph’.

— p. 262, my underlining

To make the distinction between your correction and mine, one needs a "rule" that refers back to Mrs Malaprop's actual saying, or the title of the paper at least. The best one can do is to resort to a 'rule of thumb' along the lines of 'charity' whereby one tries to maximise the good sense and consistency of the speaker given that 'something has gone wrong somewhere'.

Here's a curiosity. I only noticed yesterday that the underlined words should be swapped around. — Srap Tasmaner

I recognise the truth of your observation, and can see informally how it follows from a correct interpretation of the context, in the context of the other occurrences of the two words in the passage. But this is surely the death knell for any complete description.

We know what he meant. But we only know it after a long discussion has led us to understand at depth what he needs to have meant in the context of the whole paper. A nice derangement indeed! Do you think it was deliberate?

so you could also just think of this as a variant. — Srap Tasmaner

What are the rules for what can or cannot be thought of (understood, interpreted) as a variant? I think this is the question at issue. Glaswegian is a variant of English, Pidgin is a more distant relative, French a different language with some commonalities - like chequers played on the same board as chess with different rules and simpler pieces. It starts to look like even chess cannot be specified exactly; I seem to remember endless negotiations about the fine details of grandmaster matches - between Fischer & Spassky and Fischer and Karpov. Making up the rules?

I have a mouth; caves have mouths, rivers have mouths. We all know what a mouth is - what is a mouth?

Now suppose that someone were to say much the same about language as we say about the rules of chess; that there are a set of... semantic and syntactic criteria... that explicate the 'movements' allowed in making use of a language, allowing us to proceed from a given utterance. A piece of apparent language - a 'move' - is presented which goes against those criteria. Now if the supposition were correct, we would be in the same position as in the game of chess, left unable to proceed. — Banno

Reminds me of computer languages - miss a comma and everything goes to pot. At which thought I wonder if a consideration of redundancy and error trapping might be useful?

Auto-correct + guess at a meaning + ignore what makes no sense. How does one understand a sta-sta-sta-stammerer? Or a Glaswegian ...

What a curious notion, that in every circumstance, the same kind of response is wise. It's idiotic frankly.

Mind you, as my mother used to say, quoting some long forgotten play or something. "A nice cup of tea is always nice."

It's the volatility that's going to be a challenge. — frank

In your summary of climate change, I think you missed out the consequence of the mass extinction event we're presiding over. — Punshhh

Never mind the deforestation, the collapse of environment, the loss of the most fertile farmland, the mass extinctions , the loss of pollinating insects, the expanding deserts, never mind the radical change in society to become carbon neutral, how we going to deal with sea-level rise, and the climate refugees it will be producing?

https://phys.org/news/2019-09-refugees-seas-home.html

The Greenland ice sheet has passed the point of no return and will all melt. That's a sea level rise of 6 meters locked in, not counting Antarctic ice and mountain glaciers.

Genes are selfish like dogs are selfish. To call a dog selfish is an analogy because a dog has no self to conserve. :P — Nils Loc

But nobody calls dogs selfish; cats, maybe. Anyway dogs think they are humans so they must think they have selves, and as Descartes demonstrated, there is nothing more to being a self than the thought.

of self-interested persons or self-conserving structures — Nils Loc

Bloody Dawkins. Utter not these terms in the same breath. The notion that genes are selfish is an analogy. Accordingly, take note that a self- interested person is not necessarily self-conserving, and vice versa. If you eat too many KitKats you will get fat and die young.

Yes, but what is the rule that ensures survival? — Roy Davies

Seriously, for a moment... Dawkins played with this, talking about memes. But look at nature and see if you can find a rule. The only one I can think of is 'don't destroy the environment you depend on.'

It would be nice if truth or usefulness or intelligence were aids to survival, but dogmatic simplicity and narrative empathy do pretty well too. Perhaps ideas that can stick together and make a coherent whole have an advantage in forming a stable ideo-system.

Think rhymes and rule of three, think rhetoric. I imagine science as a top predator; powerful against weaker less substantial religious ideas, but sadly unaware of its total dependence on the complex web of morals and customs that make education to such heights possible.

Peckish maybe, but hardly ravenous. Looks a bit tame for a rave anyway, I mean rave - on carpet?

And this also feels no quite Buddhist to me. — Coben

Buddhists are at least as as various as Christians, and I cannot pretend to speak for any of them. My understanding of both religions is much better than that of most adherents.

Well probably not, but I make what sense I can philosophically of what seems to be a kernel of something true.

Can we not reduce all this to the simple necessity that language is prior to any language theory?
Just as music is prior to music theory. In the beginning was the expletive, and the expletive was understood to be 'Oh fuck!', or 'ug!' for short.