Perhaps the goals are maximize production? — schopenhauer1

Yes. Or perhaps mere survival. Or perhaps non-survival. An antinatalist society works towards it own demise, no? A worthy goal surely?

As Shakers are celibate, new members cannot be born into the group and must join from the outside. — wiki

This is the significant bit from an antinatalist view. Why I picked them. It's often controversial how a society is delineated, and this has the convenience also of clear definition of membership and explicit covenanted agreement between members as to the goals and expectations of the society. Usually it's all much more vague and unspoken.

I don't think lockdowns are a good idea — NOS4A2

The complacency of youth! Do you not remember the days when leprosy was an incurable worldwide scourge, and the poor sufferers were shunned from society and obliged to ring a warning bell and cry "unclean" lest any healthy person become infected? Historically This is situation normal - expect many to die, expect many to be outcast, expect personal catastrophe to strike without warning. Watch and pray.

1) Are there discernible goals societies want from individuals?
2) What are the social controls in place to make this happen?
3) Are society's goals at odds with the interests/rights of the individual? — schopenhauer1

1. Sometimes, perhaps always if one has the all-seeing eye of God.
2. Bah. Empathy, conformity, coercion, human nature, and mainly, education.
3. Yes, no, maybe.

For example:
A society after your own heart - the Shakers. A goal of the salvation of the members, and possibly of the world. And one presumes that the members share that goal, otherwise they leave. And amongst the subordinate goals, to abstain from reproduction.

Alas, a society that does not reproduce dies out; it is a biological inevitability. Alas or hurrah, I suppose according to your point of view. Anyway Shaker survives only as furniture.

Individuals are the cells of the body-politic. Don't overstrain the analogy, but in the development of the fingers of the human hand, the formation proceeds by a selective dying of the cells 'between' what will become the fingers. Is it in the interest of those cells to die? One cannot speak in these terms to say yes or no. The developing embryo is the cells, the cells are the embryo; the dying is integral with the living.

Care to opine on this as it is what the O.P. is all about? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Not really, because as you have made clear that you are concerned with matters of text and matters of fact, I have nothing to say about these aspects. Was there ever a boy who cried wolf, and exactly how many times did he cry it? I don't know or care. Is honesty the foundation of communication and community? That, I care about.

A small point but biologists seen to see the selfish gene creating all our reactions. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

A small point but the author of The Selfish Gene himself admits in his preface, that the idea is an analogy; that in fact genes have no self and no interests; they are not equipped to care or know whether they survive or not. They are bits of chemical. As a science bible, it is just as liable to misinterpretation by literalists as the other bible.

the question asks if he lives by the Golden Rule that he preached. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

And my answer is that the story doesn't work if he is a hypocrite, so the story is that he isn't. It is as if I confessed to a belief in justice, and you showed me that judges are sometimes unjust. "Of course they are, that's why we need to believe in justice. If justice always prevailed, belief would have no function."

why assume that there is any representation going on at all when one is angry? — jkg20

Well folks seem to get angry, and we talk about anger. So we represent it. But I rather agree with you if you are saying that the startling insights of neurobabble have been once again contrasted with a straw man of primitive ignorance. Let's just say that it would be an unnecessary distraction for one who is angry to be experiencing an inner state at all, let alone conceptualising it, and he would be better employed directing the fist to the face. And it is in retrospect that he declares his anger as some-internal-thing that provoked the blow. To experience oneself emotionally is to be divided from oneself.

I wonder how this kind of insight could be related to the incontrovertible neurofacts?

Why is one angry? Because one is hurt, someone has said an unkind thing; and when someone says a flattering thing you are pleased. Why are you hurt? Self-importance, is it not? And why is there self-importance? Because one has an idea, a symbol of oneself, an image of oneself, what one should be, what one is or what one should not be. Why does one create an image about oneself? Because one has never studied what one is, actually. We think we should be this or that, the ideal, the hero, the example. What awakens anger is that our ideal, the idea we have of ourselves, is attacked. And our idea about ourselves is our escape from the fact of what we are. But when you are observing the actual fact of what you are, no one can hurt you. Then, if one is a liar and is told that one is a liar it does not mean that one is hurt; it is a fact. But when you are pretending you are not a liar and are told that you are, then you get angry, violent. So we are always living in an ideational world, a world of myth and never in the world of actuality.

source

If self-reports of emotion experience have any validity at all, then when projected into geometric space, those reports should exhibit a simple structure (Thurstone, 1935), with one factor each for anger, sad- ness, fear, and so on. This would provide evidence that each kind of emotion is associated with an experiential primitive feeling, meaning that the feeling cannot be broken down into component parts or reduced to any- thing else psychological. If self-reports fail to show simple structure, then this can be taken as evidence that those reports are not valid.

But I think we already knew that, didn't we? A report is not an expression. Don't believe me when I say I am angry, believe the smack in the gob. What we used to call a few years ago a 'fight or flight response' is a physiological call to action which is named after the event 'anger' or 'fear' according to the direction of the action taken. Experience is conceptualised after the event, necessarily so. Not experiences at all, but confabulated justifications of otherwise inexplicable behaviour. "I smacked you in the gob because I was angry - it must have been like that."

'Logos' is the Greek, the word, or thought, or idea or reason.

Thus logic is the laws of thought - how it works; or of words.

Logic is an invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers. — Xtrix

As if there is a clear demarcation. Philosophers do not teach and teachers do not philosophise.

Nonsense! When does it begin? at the beginning of the sentence. Talk nonsense - I do it quite often, and mean to communicate thereby. Analogy is nonsense because it is ana-logical.

Most Christians seem to think so as they say that Yahweh/Jesus can do no evil. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I can't speak for most, or indeed any Christians as such, but this much seems unbiblical already. The way I heard it, the devil thought it worth having a three way tempt of Jesus in the desert. And he resisted. He could have done evil, but he didn't.

But if I was going to be a Christian, I wouldn't be engaging with this sort of question at all. There is an idea of Jesus as the ideal of humanity. So I might believe in that, and be immune from the facticity of biblical verbiage. Jesus the magic man is boring. But Jesus the idea, Jesus the direction, Jesus the imaginary friend, is another matter.

As to stroke-Yahweh, frankly who cares? A trumped up mouse god hiding in a secret box.

Cohorts are technically exhausted the moment one person dies, t — Isaac

Ok. Then I have no idea what you are talking about. Just ignore me, I was thinking Roman army divisions - not exhausted even by decimation.

Before infection reaches 40%, herd immunity plays a very limited role. — Benkei

There is no certainty that immunity will ever reach that modest figure.

"Right now, we have no evidence that the use of a serological test can show that an individual has immunity or is protected from reinfection."

She added: "These antibody tests will be able to measure that level of seroprevalence - that level of antibodies but that does not mean that somebody with antibodies means that they are immune."

I wonder if anyone is modelling a scenario where herd immunity doesn't happen, and vaccines don't work.

You cannot accurately predict the death rate using a snapshot of the fatality rate at a given moment in time and simply extrapolate unless you use a very short timescale. — Isaac

A short timescale? It looks to me as though that timescale is about up to the point where herd immunity might become a factor. Cohorts will not be exhausted as long as the virus is spreading geographically to new populations. Is that right?

I’ll watch some videos on it though — TheDarkElf

Anarchism is the 'other' side of the political world where left and right meet up again. It always has the major difficulty of trying to prevent anyone from forming a government/mafia.

Have you read Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed? Excellent depiction of what an anarchist society needs to look like. Or you could try William Morris, News from Nowhere, for a Victorian version. Both of these are what might be called left wing visions of anarchism . Someone else will have to propose or expound a right wing version - Rand maybe???. You could also research the Diggers for a real historical movement.

It's closely related to pacifism - without authority there can be no war and violence must necessarily always and only be personal. Now one does not need to ask if pacifism is viable; it obviously is in the sense that most of the people most of the time do not fight, and it obviously isn't in the sense that organised fighting cannot be prevented. Just as capitalism fails (as we are seeing, when men fail to live up to the rational self-interest ideal, and communism fails when they are self-interested and greedy, so too anarchism fails because men turn out to be less than fully independent and responsible.

My beef: we responsibly shut down our economy based on the science and now the science says we will be ready to open May 1st BUT our Mayor disagrees with the same science and said there are other things to consider. What other things? — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Science speaks with many maybes and possiblys and perhapses. There is a good deal of "no evidence" like this bunch of nincompoops for example.

https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0418/1132298-who-anti-bodies-covid-19/?fbclid=IwAR0x2A5stdMqEw98mdXBVCEfJ7Usb_ui86Nd5z5hlnjfPs2k_JvOv_EM8Lk

Senior WHO epidemiologists warned despite the hopes governments across the world have piled on antibody tests, there is no proof those who have been infected cannot be infected again.

Now if the whole virus doesn't produce immunity, it's hard to see how a vaccine would work, and we might just have to get used to a lot of people dying a lot younger and being ill a lot oftener. But I wouldn't be in a great rush to welcome that situation

Who else has so fallen from grace?
— Banno — emancipate

Marcuse, Russel himself. It turns out that dirty old men don't make he greatest moral philosophers. Wittgenstein survives maybe because he was gay.

Bestiality? That's sick in more ways than one. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I understand you moderns have delicate sensibilities about slavery and this strange 'eat it or fuck it but not both' thing going, but it's hardly fair to project these onto the good ol' boys, now is it? You'll be saying next that trial by ordeal isn't proper justice!

I guess when your country is founded by a paedophile slave rapist — StreetlightX

It's so annoying when that happens isn't it? But I suspect there is a category error hiding there. Slaves have no human rights because they are property, so the abuse of slaves wouldn't be rape or child rape, but some kind of animal husbandry.

But in itself, is it the problem? Or is it the form of government, the federal republic as so-called democracy? Or the particular form of the American government, with its three branches of government? — tim wood

I think you have to blame the people in a democracy. If the people get conned, as the people clearly have been conned, it is hard for them to admit it until it is impossible to deny it. And there are always the same weaknesses at the heart of every conned person, which are greed and fear. Let's make everything great again without any hard work or sacrifice. Vote Ponzi!

Everyone with symptoms should keep away from the healthy and ring a warning bell and shout "unclean, unclean." whenever anyone gets close. On pain of being stoned to death. It's traditional.

Someone might be interested in this, not really on topic but as you seem to have finished -ish...

http://www.truthandpower.com/blog/blog/the-darkness-of-this-time-wittgensteins-pessimism/?fbclid=IwAR2-T0toc2eNNeKrLl6XD21I25kQC8ZvWFQsrdhXCzH-h0uoV2uz54j9IqY

But for sheer petty-minded vindictive nastiness, no one can beat the current administration.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/us-blocks-sale-ventilators-cuba-after-acquiring-medical-companies?fbclid=IwAR0F6xenKKXw1JMFR_9GLmiRtPQWmqrl9buOwzbnmQ4CGeQe1LYif3Cm5JY#.XpqlAEYopjo.facebook

Get Covid done. As Machiavelli said, get the nasty stuff done quickly at the beginning of your reign, and then you can be the kind generous leader afterwards to the folks that are left. Dead men do not rebel, and nor do they vote. Give the NHS the clap! And stay at home til it's too late.

The first rule of Tractatus Club is 'Do not talk about Tractatus Club' — unenlightened

Outside the world cannot be pictured but neither can Wittgenstein's arguments. So his views are circular — Gregory

Which he declared himself.

Later, though, he found a way of not talking about Tractatus Club that demonstrates the rule without stating it. A roundabout method that is like a circle, but more active.

The first rule of Tractatus Club is 'Do not talk about Tractatus Club'

First, you have the world, and that includes all that we can talk about sensibly. — Sam26

What can be sensed one can talk sensibly about.

."What can be sensed one can talk sensibly about. " is not sensible talk, because one cannot sense 'what can be sensed' but only what is sensed.

But there is a further limitation, that one can only talk sense of that which is named. Thus naming as a process (of ships or persons), becomes a senseless ritual that makes sense. The Titanic couldn't sink until it was named.

To be honest I think it's deeply ingenuous to place the focus on Trump's personal failings. It's both a distraction from his politics - which in the end is all anyone should give a shit about - and more importantly, is premised upon the fantasy that if only a more 'competent, cultured and articulate' person were in office, everything would be better — StreetlightX

No one gave a shit when Obama blew up hospitals in the Middle-East because he was so charming. — StreetlightX

Some of us did. Indeed a certain person of colour in my own household was extremely critical before that, on reading his rather weak autobiography. And it was based firmly on a judgement of character. The problem with any hierarchical system from monarchy to democracy is two-fold that kings, presidents advisors and functionaries can be incompetent and/or malicious. So the character of the person at the top is always significant, and in a democracy is more so intimately bound up with the character of the people.

And that is where I am critical.

Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are. — an articulate and witty writer

No they are not. They are a vicious, ignorant, and sentimental folk. Just like us. And we fall for the same kind of bloated bluff con man. Which is a deep fault of the culture, deeper than 'the system'.

And the unconscious is entirely rational. Why wouldn't it be? — A Seagull

Well that is an interesting question. Do you suppose there might be, or must be, a reason for being irrational? I'm not sure that is a rational position whether it is is conscious or not.

what is the relationship between language and logical thinking? — Enrique

'Logos' is the Greek word for ... well, the word, the language and something more like rationality. So the logic we know of is a formalism of language close to a grammar. "In the beginning was the word. and the word was with God, and the word was God."

But consider a cat, sitting in front of a mouse hole waiting to see if a mouse will come out. One does not call the cat irrational, but neither does the cat articulate its reasons.

So we might say that cats are sensible, they negotiate the world of their senses in an appropriate manner.
But cats say no such thing, they say 'meow'. They behave in a reasonable manner without reasoning.

Likewise, thanks are not a currency subject to devaluation by excess issuing. One can happily pass one's expressions of gratitude to all and sundry with no lasting harm done.

So thank you for raising this important and interesting debate, and for articulating it beautifully.

This demonstration presupposes — Samuel Lacrampe

What a foolish demonstration, to presuppose something. It is however an example of the way science proceeds, not by asking if everyone agrees, but by inviting them to see for themselves. And your objection is one that might be better accommodated by another experiment, rather than by asking what a bunch of fuckwits think.

It's perverse in a way that words don't quite do justice to. — StreetlightX

So I've been looking for a song, and I think this is a near as I can get to it, from, appropriately, Planet Waves.

Read Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven.
ASAP.
And meanwhile:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

Or,

Comes a time when the blind man takes your hand
Says, "Don't you see?
Gotta make it somehow on the dreams you still believe
Don't give it up, you got an empty cup
That only love can fill, only love can fill"

...or it could be a true awakening. — Banno

And even if it isn't, one has to take it that one is awake, because snoring is boring.

I watched a programme about Bergen Belsen las night. film of the bodies being buried by the thousand in mass graves when it was liberated, and the place being burned to the ground to disinfect it. Over 14,000 inmates died after the liberation.

I also heard that UK policy has been to send recovering CV patients to care homes and hospices. You know, those care homes and hospices that were being shielded and so didn't need PPE or tests. It's odious to make any comparison.

I am odious.

Today there is a new policy to test in care homes. But there are still not enough tests for the hospitals, so they might as well have a policy to send the virus to the moon. or shoot it on sight, like that chap in the Philippines.

I have a sore throat and a cough, so I am using a non-touch screen and wearing gloves to post. You should probably still cover your eyes before reading this - duct tape is good.

Here's one you can do yourself on your next holiday. get yourself a good walking stick and the day before your holiday set to stand on level ground and measure the length of the shadow at noon, which is to say when the shadow is shortest. Jump on a train and head a few hundred miles North or South and repeat the measurement the next day. Also measure the stick and estimate the distance you have travelled North or South. Calculate the size of the Earth from these results just as the Greeks did thousands of years ago.

Did you conduct the demonstrations yourself, — Samuel Lacrampe

YES. There's nothing like doing some experiments and making some observations for oneself, for giving confidence in science. I haven't done every experiment ever reported, life's too short, but I've done enough of the crucial ones to have confidence in the generality of physics and chemistry. This is how science is taught, and how it is done, no experiment is considered definitive until it can be repeated consistently.

Regardless, this is a misunderstanding about the PUP. As described in the OP, it states that "if a large majority of subjects perceives the same object, then [...]". It says "perceives", and not "claims to perceive". — Samuel Lacrampe

It comes to the same thing. Subjects can only know they perceive the same thing by communicating. But look, you are wrong. you have been shown to be wrong. And I'm going to leave it there. Do some science and stop pontificating about it until you have done some. You started with a misunderstanding of the difference between illusion and hallucination, and it has lead to what is essentially an anti-scientific dogmatic position with a slightly postmodernist spin. Nonsense.

the scientific method is flawed because scientists who apply it can always lie about the results. — Samuel Lacrampe

You have a flawed conception of the scientific method. It does not rely on what scientists say but on what they can demonstrate. Thus a scientist may lie about what they did and what happened, but they will be found out when other people do the same thing and something different happens. and this is because scientists believe their own experience over what people say. And this was the revolution in thinking, that the old stories and claims were to be tested, and not believed just because everyone believed them before. "Show me, or it didn't happen" is the essence of science. "Everyone says it so it must be so" is the essence of dogma.

it can be controlled by doing things like a double blind test, etc. — Samuel Lacrampe

I think you should call that the principle of universal imperception.

Genetics could also be a factor. — frank

It's much, much more likely to be a matter of how data is collected, what counts as serious or critical, and so on. There is no established methodology for estimating the prevalence in the population, no international agreement as to what symptoms are counted as serious and no consistency about the circumstances that warrant tests. At the moment in the UK, the advice is that if your life is not in immediate danger because you have breathing difficulties, you should not even contact the health service, just go online and read the advice (take some paracetamol and take it easy). Other cultures may cry 'emergency' if they sneeze, but we are tough. That and pollution levels, demographics of population age, economic factors, diet, and fuck knows what else.

Now consider 2 scenarios with 10 subjects trying to determine if there is a horse in a field:
(1) 9 out of 10 subjects see a horse; the other 1 does not.
(2) 1 out of 10 subjects see a horse; the other 9 do not.

In which of the 2 scenarios is it more reasonable to believe the horse is real? — Samuel Lacrampe

Well call me an arrogant twat, but if I can see the whole field and see that there is no horse in it, I will trust my eyes over the talk of 9 people. Because I know that people lie, that people see what they want to see, and that people conform. See also The Emperor's New Clothes.

Although I suspect that Johnson has had a Damascene conversion following his own infection. — Punshhh

Any reason for your uncharacteristic optimism?

This is missing the point (which admittedly with hindsight is unsurprising when using the desert example). We could have used the perception of a unicorn in a room instead. — Samuel Lacrampe

True story.
As it happens, in my mis-spent youth, I spent an hour or so with a friend who was having an animated conversation with what seemed to me to be an empty armchair. As they were both, it seemed to me, ignoring me, particularly the occupant of the armchair, who neither spoke to me nor made himself visible, I should probably have concluded that I was an imaginary being. However, I stubbornly maintained that it was the person in the armchair that was the hallucination, and my friend was having the hallucinations.

Again democracy fails us, because if one can hallucinate a unicorn, one can surely equally hallucinate a crowd of other people shouting "Bloody hell there's that damn unicorn again, shitting on the lawn and having it off with the last virgin in the country."

Thanks for that. What a lot of people there are making it all up, and exaggerating.

I thought I had already mentioned this.

1. Most people in are homes are not being taken to hospital with suspected CV because it is "not in their interest".

2. People who do not go to hospital are not being tested for CV.

3. People who have not been tested are not counted as 'confirmed cases, or as deaths from CV.

Therefore:

4. The cases and deaths published daily are underestimates by at a very rough guess 50% to 150%.

I know I did mention that this government is being accused by me of deliberate genocide.