DNA language makes up for 64 possibilities, as do I Ching hexagrams. — Noble Dust

When one consults the I Ching with the yarrow stalks, the first thing one does is to lay one stalk aside. This represents the unchanging aspect of being, the ultimate unity of all. One is interested, for the moment, in the changing aspect - the ephemeral. The book itself is unchanging, but one reads a different section each time, and each section describes a way of things changing in terms relevant to humanity.

So it is psychological in character, and describes the laws of thought, or information theory. The close relation to DNA and to computers is not an accident or coincidence, but a necessary feature of all things algorithmic.

The West dismisses its own adage, "As above, so below." as mere superstition, but the self-sameness at different levels of fractals falls out of the mathematics of self- referential definition and reiteration (change).

Incidentally, it's more that the Tao is heavily Ching-ist; Lao Tzu draws heavily on the imagery of the I Ching in the Tao, and inevitably so as the Tao is, as it were, the missing piece of the I Ching, the stick that was laid aside.

The appropriate analogy is smoking. Not many people die of smoking - quite a lot of smokers die of lung cancer. Do not imagine that smoking is harmless though. Likewise covid - it's early days - but there are hints that it may do permanent damage to the lungs and other organs in significant numbers of survivors.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-53356593

a couple of preliminary comments:
1. Words have meaning in virtue of their negative space; running is not walking, or not flying or not stationary.
2. The same word can have different meanings according to their various different negative spaces. The engine running not stalled; the course is running next term; the rabbit is running not hopping.

real - not imaginary
real - not painted
real - not virtual
real - not made-up
real - not a hallucination
real - not a semblance

Thus a mirage is contrasted with an oasis or in optics, a real image with a virtual image. Don't expect there to be one single sense in which things are real; a stick insect is a real insect, but not a real stick.

But some people have it and others don't. We cannot be indifferent to this. — JerseyFlight

Indeed.

this is the point. To figure out a way to expand knowledge freely. — JerseyFlight

Well I have been involved with the Free school movement and the home education movement and in my dotage I involve myself here and elsewhere online. There is wiki, there are free online courses, I'm not sure that figuring is going to do much without some action.

How does a person come to possess knowledge? Is it a matter of will power? — JerseyFlight

I don't like to talk about knowledge as a possession. I give freely what knowledge I have and in that relationship I learn.

Will has no power, but is the expression of conflict.

Exemplum: I used to habitually smoke tobacco, and had the idea that i wanted to stop. But I could not manage it and said I didn't have enough will power to overcome the addiction. Then one day I had an insight, that it is the easiest thing in the world to not do something one does not want to do. The difficulty was that I didn't want not to smoke because it made me uncomfortable. Seeing the simplicity of it, I decided that actually I did want to stop smoking and suffer the discomfort, so I stopped. No will required, just an end to the conflict between what I want and what I don't want.

As if one goes to the shop to buy something, and finds it costs more than one wants to pay. And by an act of will power one hands over the money and buys the thing. No, knowledge is not accumulated by frowning deeply and thrusting out one's jaw. Hear a song, sing along, and before you know it, you know it. Not a possession so much as something one ia absorbed by and that one absorbs in turn.

...humans are not consciously promoting an advanced species because they do not understand that individual quality is the result of social quality, most specifically universal access and opportunity to a comprehensive education. — JerseyFlight

Hi. I am very interested in education and developmental psychology, but I am struggling to understand your thesis in this thread. The above seems to be a historical claim that I cannot reconcile with my general understanding of history. Education has always been a privilege, and always, the privileged have invested heavily in the education of their children. Up until very recent times, there has always been a heavy burden of physical labour involved in mere survival as well as in the processes and materials of education. So the universality of education is necessarily a recent affair. One cannot educate children properly if one needs them to work in the coal mines or herding the sheep. Nevertheless, a reverence for books and writing has been widespread for a long time.

Perhaps what we might more agree on is that we are now at a stage of social transition, where we have the economic capacity to invest in universal education, but we have yet to adjust our societies from a graduated privilege based one to a fully universal one.

As to what I said about producing healthy humans, see Allan Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. What happens to a human in the process of development, and how it happens, is not idealism but has empirical verification. — JerseyFlight

I'm not familiar with your reference, but a very quick glance suggests to me that it relates quite closely to other material connected to the ACE questionnaire and work on childhood trauma. But I wonder if it wouldn't be better to explore this separately from the question of education? I can see the connection of course, as someone who found his own childhood education rather traumatic. But I think two threads are better than one in this case.

Well, from what I gather losing children mothers' wanted is relevant to the abortion debate only to the extent that it shows women are, at best confused, at worst being whimsical as regards the personhood status of fetuses. — TheMadFool

Fuck me! If that's what you gather, stick to hunting.

No words can be adequate for such a tragedy — TheMadFool

My point is that a few generations ago this was a commonplace occurrence. At that time, and all previous times, one could not afford for 'no words' to be 'adequate'. The way we think and the way we feel has been changed by modern medicine.

So, for example, the unbaptised dead were not admitted to salvation and heaven, and this attitude survived well into the C, 20th, and affected the burial of the dead and the treatment of the living.

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

Bear in mind that these institutions are the bastions of anti-abortion.

To think, to legislate, to act with intelligence, one has to draw a line in the sand as to what is a person or not a person, or what is alive or dead, or what has rights or no rights. Try not to pretend, though, that these distinctions are as sharp and absolute in the world as they are in the mind. Acorns become oak trees; we know the difference, and we know the sameness.

The neuter genitive would be the natural locution for a foetus whose sex is unknowable and whose survival is uncertain. Infant mortality is so low as to be neglected in people's thinking these days, but of yore, one did not over-invest in the humanity of that which may well not survive to speak.

Tell that to a mother who wants her baby. — TheMadFool

What will you tell a mother who has lost the baby she wanted? The Catholic church has a doctrine on these matters, but other philosophers should manage without.

When you are so confident about motivations, you should know something about the world to which you refer. — jgill

I know something; perhaps you know more. And back on topic a bit, it may be middle-class self-satisfaction that cannot believe that the working class can do anything on its own initiative. It may be that the media records the middle-class socialists like the Fabian Society and pays them attention and forgets the grassroots organisers of the Grunwick strike, or earlier, the Penrhyn Quarry strike.

Yes, knowing that other people are worse off cheers me up too. — Michael

I'm sorry to hear that. :cry:

I have observed this in young British men who are addicted to the sport of climbing. They pool their resources for housing and food and pursue their dreams. (However, my observations are dated having been from the 1980s. Thatcher's government might have made this less likely). — jgill

I suspect that these were more likely middle-class than working class. My recollection is that even in the good old days, you needed to be pretty damn literate to negotiate the benefits system with any degree of success. I've known a few climbers too in N. Wales, and they climbed the slate quarries for fun, precisely because they were not the children of the quarrymen who climbed them with drills and explosives for a living.

At either end of the social spectrum there is a leisure class. — jgill

Explain?

Alternatively, worry less about your own life and more about all the people who have it far worse and could really use your help. Parents, jobs, education? You are almost as lucky as me!

What makes people from wealthy, academical background lean left? — Ansiktsburk

Leisure.

If you are poor, you are likely to work hard to become less poor, because that is the obvious way to do it. You probably don't have time or education to make an analysis of society, and almost certainly not the time to spend organising a populist resistance in the form of trade unions or workers cooperatives or boycotts or demonstrations or riots. It takes time, education and money to make these efforts, and much persuasion to convince enough others to constitute any kind of power base. For any one individual, it is always a better bet to work super hard, suck up to the boss, and hope for promotion (see Jordan Peterson).

I'm the son of an architect, middle middle-class educated and comfortable, so I have had the opportunity to 'stand and stare'. As soon as you do that, it is liable to become obvious that no one ever got rich by working hard.

I actually agree conscious thought takes place at the level of the individual. — Forgottenticket

It's always nice to find 2 individuals thinking the same conscious thought - especially when their very agreement proves them wrong. :rofl:

Consider the situation in Nazi Germany. There were many laws that applied to Jews, and of course any resistance to transportation and the 'final solution' were criminal. One can see that culture as expressed in law-making is the determinant of crime; one culture criminalises another, never itself. The institution of private property creates theft as its resistance.

My culture protects itself from yours by criminalising yours and persuading (most of) you that it is right to do so. Yours is a criminal culture that produces criminals, and needs to be suppressed.

I dont want to handle stuff in my leisure time, — Ansiktsburk

There is no obligation to handle stuff here. If people are unpleasant, ignore them, and if they are hateful report them. I hope you will feel able to have the conversations you like here and pass by the inevitable silliness. I find it very helpful to try and express a viewpoint, make an argument, respond to comments - it improves my writing and deepens my understanding and corrects my errors. Some threads are above my pay grade and some are beneath my dignity; some folks are interesting to read but painful to engage; some are painful to read. Please, bat away the flies, and join the picnic.

Interesting discussion, guys.

Assume that 3 people are in the original position and they are considering how to create a just institution of marriage. None of them know which, if any, are male or female. — JohnRB

So the idea is that the veil of ignorance obliges one to take an approximately neutral position that favours equality in so far as it is compatible with prosperity, stability. and so on. Now in principle, one is ignorant of one's own position, but cognisant of the consequences of whatever options are being considered. And this is problematic in the case of marriage, or I should more properly say in more neutral terms the fundamental organisation of sexual relations, living arrangements and child-rearing.
What one has to call 'experiments' with other ways of living are so few, so diverse, and so pre-soaked in the conventions of family, that I do not think one can make a judgement.

It is a fairly general problem with the theory, that it tends, even with the good-will to all engendered by the veil, to stay with the known arrangements - 'for fear of something worse'. Not many of us have been brought up with free love in a commune, and one tends to have experienced a (monogamous) family for better, or institutional care for worse. So from the limited knowledge one has, I suspect most people (here) would favour something close to voluntary consenting relationships of any number with means of ending them available, and robust protection for minors. Roughly what we decadent Westerners have.

Anyways, just because Rawls invented the original position as a thought experiment, does not prevent us from conducting the experiment on our own knowledge and experience and reaching different conclusions. Those used to tribal living, or from a Kibbutz, might have other ideas...

Taken together as one scheme, — Rawls, A Theory of Justice (rev. ed.), p. 6

Incidentally, I understand this phrase to acknowledge in principle, that there are other possible schemes, that one might choose if one knew of them.

An interesting critique of Western Society from an external view, can be found here and may be instructive. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/meet-the-natives

I say this despite being critical of Peterson; why him and now? — fdrake

Internet phenomenon. but see also any number of charismatists. Why Loreal? Because you're worth it. Why Mcvomit's? Because I'm loving' it. Why David Ike? Why Jim Jones?

Find a common vulnerability - exploit it. This is not a new thing, it's a venerable tradition; people do not like being told that love means taking up your cross and getting crucified, they want to hear that it's being very nice and popular, and having friends and admirers. They want to hear that if they pretend to enjoy being exploited, they will stop being exploited. Peterson is selling soft soap cunningly disguised as hard rock (for real men). But look out, them commies want to steal your freedom!

The nearest answer to 'why now?' is that the generation that kew what fascism was is dying. The furthest answer is that the loss of all social control has resulted from a century of psycho-social manipulation - we have driven ourselves mad.

But Trumplestiltskin can spin straw into gold.

I take why people buy it seriously. — fdrake

But that is trivial. People like easy answers and comfortable answers better than true answers and no answers. They like to be empowered even if it is a fantasy of power. They like cheap. They like to get Brexit done and make America great again.

We have become independent as we've evolved through time. — Yozhura

I really don't think so. Oxygen breathers depend on oxygen producers - animals depend on plants. Ecological studies show how very very dependent we are on the diversity of the environment, from the insects that pollinate our crops, the crops themselves, to the various predators that control other populations, the bacteria and fungi that breakdown organic matter and so on.

Should we act more as a single entity, — Yozhura

Don't believe the nonsense about rational self-interested man. Overwhelmingly, we cooperate; we stop at the stop signs we work for each other, other people build our homes and our machines and grow and cook our food and fix our teeth; most of us would not last a week without the assistance of a vast network of cooperating social relations.

So neither biologically, nor socially, nor even psychologically are we remotely independent. (I didn't work this out on my own.)

A fascinating read! You can find my full response in the after-post that follows the end of this post.

Provoking you to think of us humans as a single thing inhabiting this planet and consuming it on it's way. — Yozhura

Yes. are you familiar with Eco-philosophy at all? There is quite a lot of work been done over many years. Arne Naess is probably a good place to start.

Consider that there is no fixed human nature, and thus no fixed place in or relation to any ecosystem. Rather our nature is mainly conditioned by thought and by culture.

What should we do now, that we know we're the viruses? — Yozhura

We're not viruses, we're mammals. But your thrust is rather that we are pathogens to our environment. This is a fairly common occurrence, and there is an evolutionary pressure on pathogens to minimise the harm they do, and towards a symbiotic relationship. This is fairly easy to understand; If Dutch Elm Disease kills all the elm trees, it will kill itself. It might manage to jump species, but if it does the same thing again, it will have the same effect in the new environment.

So finding another planet to destroy is not a solution for humans. There is only learning to be a benign part of a balanced ecosystem, or face extinction. There are any number of folks will tell you something different, because this is an unpalatable truth, and there is a large market for comfortable lies. This only makes extinction the more likely.

There's a conflation of producer and innovator, as creator of new goods and new markets, entrepreneur, as trader in goods from here to there, and rentier, as pure exploiter of 'possession'. The rentier likes to claim the virtue of the entrepreneur who provides a service of distribution, and the entrepreneur likes to claim the virtue of the innovator/producer.

In principle, it seems to me the world belongs to everyman, and everyman belongs to the world. So my private property deprives you and everyman of a portion of that "natural" heritage, and a debt is incurred by that privation. Let us call that debt "property tax". Property tax should bear some relation to rental value, such that there is little profit in depriving everyman of a property in order to rent the property to some man.

He's a bit of a joke really isn't he?

But Anyway, {quote= Jordan-the-Moron} Wiffle waffle. {/quote} will format your quotes nicely if you replace the curly brackets with square ones, like this:

Wiffle waffle. — Jordan-the-Moron

Quoting a post is even easier; select the bit you want and a quote button appears and a click does the same thing wherever your cursor is in your reply.

Funny how people always think that people they agree with are good posters. — Benkei

This is definitely a thing. — jamalrob

I agree, well said.

Honestly, I don't care about that at all. — Hippyhead

Honestly, I don't care "if all the hippies cut off all their hair."

I would like to suggest that the mods consider opening a new section which is readable by all, but only the mods can post there. This would allow the mods to present an uncontaminated modeling of what they'd like to see across the forum. — Hippyhead

Do you not think that dealing with "contamination" is an important part of the modelling? I agree, and have mentioned before that the way mods behave is as important as the editorial oversight.

To be fair to @Benkei, a minimum standard is not elitism. That trains charge a fare is not the same kind of thing as them having first and second class carriages. Not all restriction is elitist, but your suggestion is.

↪unenlightened May we have someday a book of your collected pithy apothegms? Think of the joy you could spread with them. — tim wood

They fall like gentle Autumn leaves in the dialogical breeze - if you want to rake them into a pile, go ahead, I'm not going to get possessive about them. :cool:

Solving the world's problems at other people's expense. Everyones favourite philosophy; everyone's favourite politics. Shitbags of the world unite, you have nothing.

From the subatomic to the biological to the galactic, all this is understood or largely understood on the basis on relatively few fundamental principles. Thus we can safely fly on a jet or operate a computer. — Marco Colombini

Absolute tosh! You have it all backwards. Because we can safely fly on a jet, we can have confidence in our scientific principles. Because the magic works, we believe in science. Because the magic doesn't work, we don't believe in Daedalus and Icarus or Seven League Boots or flying carpets. If we could safely fly on carpets, we'd fly on carpets and to hell with science.

"God did it." explains everything and anything, and therefore nothing. It's not a hypothesis but a mantra.

Science is about observation and more importantly, demonstration. We all believe in science because the magic works, not because it has this or that method that we have a theory makes our knowledge secure or because the jigsaw pieces fit together.

Imagine all our machines suddenly stop working because 'it's God's will'. Faith in science would last about 10 minutes.

The tetrachromates said things like that was why they must have struggled in the shop to get the right thread to colour match a garment. The shop assistant thought the orange was a perfect match and couldn’t see how far off it was. — apokrisis

I imagine a group of tetrachromates developing their own language to name the varieties of orange from 'crumby to 'gooey' or whatever. And Some tetrachromate philosopher will of course want to know, " is my crumby orange the same as your crumby orange?"

I think @Banno's point is more that the only sense in which senses can sensibly be said to be 'the same' is that they pick out the same things consistently. There is no internal red versus external red, only a relational red that relates our sensual relations; we can talk only to the extent that our sensory worlds coincide. Red is the 'same' for everyone who can see and say that London buses are the 'same' colour as tomatoes and blood.

How do we know that my same is the same as your same?

It is futile to make such arguments. I am too lazy to explain.

I also want to add, that the implication is that there is no being born "as something else". You could only have been born as you. — schopenhauer1

As sure as eggs is eggs.

So then what is the you that is the same in all possible worlds? That is the you I am talking about. — schopenhauer1

You're the one talking about it, you tell me. I don't think there is such a thing. I think an old man has inherited a name from a baby. "Robert *****" is not the name of the DNA, or the name of anything constant in this world, let alone across all possible worlds.

I'm just average, common too
I'm just like him, the same as you
I'm everybody's brother and son
I ain't different from anyone
It ain't no use a-talking to me
It's just the same as talking to you. — Bob Dylan

You cannot not be you, in other words in all possible worlds. If you were not you, then there isn't even a "you" to be something else. "You" are more than the sum of a bunch of descriptions that could change in any possible world. — schopenhauer1

Would you admit that my mother might have aborted me? Or that the midwife might have bungled my birth so that i was born with cerebral palsy or some other brain damage? Or that some developmental problem might have made me gay, or intersex? These seem like possible events to me, in the sense that they can happen to people. Even in this world I can be a baby and an old man, and they are very different, so while I concede that "...If you were not you, then there isn't even a "you" to be something else." I can be something else and still be me, in all kinds of ways, and that includes loss of memory, body parts, brain function and most of the things one identifies as one's self.

So the point is... — schopenhauer1

Well your point is your point. And if you only want to make your point and not address my points at any point, there is not much point in my continuing to point out anything, and so at this point I think I'll stop making any further points, to be blunt.