In a monochrome world, colour words would have no application. In particular, the term 'monochrome' would have no application.

But we have gone from our RGB world of 3 dimensions of colour to a 1 dimensional 'black and white' one. Why not consider the colour language of 2 dimensions - a world of red and green but no blue for instance? Or the world of some insects and others that have more than three kinds of colour receptors?

Trolling the thread = Disagrees with me. — T Clark

No, trolling the thread = calling me silly and hysterical and presenting absolutely no argument or insight but rather attempting to shut down the discussion. Trolling the the thread is making a whole lot of noise about something else to drown out any possibility of learning anything about the topic.

On the other, eeeevvvvveerrryytbody knows we need to reduce the number of firearms in the US. So that's another drama that seems to especially fascinate non-Americans. Who knows why? It's dramatic, I guess. — frank

And here you are yet again. No one is talking about gun control in the thread. You bring it up to create another diversion, along with child abuse. What are you so scared of?

What do you say to them? — Baden

Nanu nanu. I think you must have been sleeping through Human societies 101.

And yes, I do have an axe to grind - I think this kind of hysterical reaction to this type of event hurts the country. — T Clark

Really? I mean REALLY? You think my discussion of international news from the other side of the ocean is a hysterical reaction that hurts the country? That's a seriously delicate little flower of a country you got there. Either that, or it's your hysterical reaction to my wanting to discuss something.

Please tell me why the deaths of 120 people out of a total of 2.8 million is significant. — T Clark

Sure. It's a matter of social relations. The numbers have no importance here; the importance it has is the importance it is given, just as the value of money is the value people put upon it. This is called social construction. To put it another way, everybody dies, but how one dies is 'significant'. It matters whether my wife dies of natural causes or is murdered. And it matters to the whole society, because the whole society is structured to be concerned about such things, with police and courts and so on.

But this is so blatantly fucking obvious that I have to think you are just trolling the thread now because you have some axe to grind.

You're not going to save a significant number of lives by any action you take. — T Clark

You have absolutely no idea how many lives my posts might save or cost. Perhaps a potential shooter will be transformed, or possibly pushed over the edge by something they read here. If you think the topic is of no significance, what are you doing posting so much about it? Feel free to turn your attention to significant issues any time. You are talking complete bollocks anyway; should we ignore presidential elections because they don't happen 'again and again' by your ridiculous interpretation?

We're more like the British, I would think. — Bitter Crank

The County of Sutherland in Scotland got its name from its position in the Viking territory. The word 'thing' is derived from the Viking word for their parliament. The British are the Vikings, and we still describe people who go energetically and violently insane as 'berserk'. All you whiteys are European, and your horrible culture is all based on Europe's; the vikings are an influence beyond question.

I think the Viking theory is silly. Again, it's people trying to say something to make themselves feel better, more in control of frightening things. — T Clark

It's not 'people' saying anything, it's me, no one else. And it's not a theory - see reply to BC. The 'theory' I am illustrating with an example from history, is that when the same thing keeps happening again and again in a society over decades, it cannot be sensibly regarded as an aberration. Universities inevitably have dropouts, and hero-worship inevitably has berserkers. This is our normal.

Builders also have a disdain for Architects, with their airy-fairy notions of form and function and beauty, and no proper understanding of brickwork. Let the brickies discuss trowel size and pointing finishes in peace, and the architects can discuss their rarified and impractical concerns amongst themselves elsewhere. Just don't expect a bricky to design your new house, even if he thinks he can.

One should think the reason, regardless of demographics, behind the murder is frustration. — Hanover

Hmm. Perhaps I have a different idea of what reason is. The thrust of the op is is that 'I don't like Mondays' does not count as a reason, even if it counts as a cause, and neither does 'I don't like foreigners'.

To try to say this is some kind of epidemic of Viking berserkers shows a lack of perspective. — T Clark

Good job no one said then, because a lack of perspective is a major symptom of incipient mass murder.
Nevertheless, as I pointed out, there are parallels between the US and Viking cultures, and one of them is the centrality of the hero, the individual of power to individual and national identity, hence the abhorrence of anything "social".

I don't want to push the Viking thing any further than that, it is intended merely as a provocation to have a fresh think. I want to make a couple of suggestions: that the roots of the phenomenon are deep, and on the one hand a part of human nature, and on the other, (ironically) highly socially conditioned.

The guilt precedes the crime. As a kid might act out to give concrete object to Dads angry sulk, that kid not being able to comprehend the idea of nursing a wound brought home from work. — csalisbury

Well yes, what you say is all good psychological stuff, and psychological stuff is in the business of making sense of folly. I don't disagree with this approach, but I want to try another line, that says this is heroic, laudable behaviour that has been 'misplaced'. Encouraged by the culture as the apotheosis of manhood and leadership and so on.

So come with me, where dreams are born, and time is never planned. Just think of happy things, and your heart will fly on wings, forever, in Never Never Land! — J.M.Barrie

This is not an invitation to the most wonderful life, but to the most wonderful dream. There is no contest between them, and I do not endorse and nor do I indulge in happy thoughts. This is not a thread for anyone seeking happiness or equanimity or peace, or therapeutic advice.

whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. — op

You're on your own, kiddo, and if you're not on your own, you're not in the game. Build your bridges and walk on them or burn them, but neither a bridge-borrower nor a bridge-lender be.

But still there's something about the post of yours I've quoted above which seems different than that.
As Bateson says the cycle will continue until a deeper nonwilled change happens. The idea of preparation seems to both admit the powerlesness of oneself to stop a cycle by force, but leaves room for a different kind of thing, an attentiveness maybe while it goes on and on, to maybe change things in little ways just enough to leave a little space for something outside to come through? — csalisbury

I'm so glad you're seeing somewhat what I'm trying to get at. Yes 'I' can't change/stop 'the cycle', because whenever 'I' act on 'the cycle' I'm just moving it on, or going around it some more. But 'the cycle' has that freedom ...

'Seeing without division', as the man has it.
https://www.dreamsalive.com/download/KrishnamurtiA.pdf

Why should ...? — DanielPhil

It really doesn't matter what comes after this, does it? and even if it does, why should it?

Sometimes the right answer is " Hush! Go and clean your teeth, it's bedtime."

I might say that personhood is a legal status granted to certain 'companies' (bunches of people with property?) when they have ritually drawn up and signed certain documents of 'incorporation'.
It is also usually granted to any live birth, and in some places under some conditions to the unborn. There have been recent cases seeking to grant personhood to rivers, and possibly other natural features.
It answers the question of the thread title, but this is more interesting:-

Think back to your earliest memories, then ask yourself, is this the start of me? Or did I begin when I entered this world? When did I enter it? When I remember, when I was born, when my parents first gifted me with moral consideration, or when I was conceived? If I had been lost before I was born, would I have caused my parents the same grief as if I’d died at the age of 1? — Mark Dennis

I used to have a recurring dream, very frightening, and almost beyond description. I was in a field, and then I was being crushed by an enormous weight that I couldn't escape. Then one day, about eleven yrs, when i learned where babies came from, I realised it was a birth contraction memory, and never had that dream again. I also had another recurring nightmare, that I realised was an actual birth canal journey memory, and I never had that one again after I recognised it as real but past. So what is in the gift of others is certainly vital to any life of a social being, but it is a line of declaration - of passionate declaration, by all means, that is any parents' necessity of love - to say that this bud is a rose, and it is none of anyone's business to measure the loss between one person and another. My sister lost a teenage child, and still every year fifty years later posts his picture on facebook on his birthday.

Mark, I wish that you will have a child and have much joy, and I am sure that you will always have the sadness of your loss too, and they are both immeasurable and incomparable.

The sort of thing Jung wants to get a handle on with the notion of the collective unconscious is - well, something like 'zeitgeist'. So he might talk about the energy, or momentum of Nazism in 1930s Germany. Now we could in a hand-waving way reduce it all to social facilitation, conformity, propaganda, and so on, but there are two problems, one is that it has very little explanatory value, and the other is that the reductive tendency is itself very much part of the zeitgeist. One has to reduce one's own theorising to the same semi random mechanics as everything else. But probably don't bother to try and wade through all the dude's works, there's just way too much and life's too short. Have you come across Gregory Bateson? He's more modern, and way more brief and focussed. But stay away from his fans, especially the NLP brigade.

(That link is just a random paper I happened to have already in reference to another thread. 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind is his classic)

Just to be absolutely clear, I am saying that since it is false that "No people are not dinosaurs." it must necessarily be true that at least one person is not a dinosaur. And thus that there are no people is incompatible with the given premise.

... all what have a horn and no horn?? — bongo fury

Try this. If I have no money, I have no money in my left pocket, and no money in my right pocket. So where's all my money? In my pockets, obviously. So I take all my money and give it to you and because I have no money I give you nothing, and I still have no money in my pockets, even though I just gave you all the money in my pockets.

No, I don't think so. The region was excluded, so in the negation it is opened up again, but not necessarily populated. — bongo fury

You think wrong, regions are not 'excluded' but declared empty or declared populated, the one being the negation of the other. So the negation of 'All x are y' (the region {x & not-y} is empty) is 'Some x are not y' (the region {x & not-y} is populated).

And this must be so, because if there are no unicorns, then there are no unicorns with a horn AND no unicorns without a horn. Thus they all have a horn AND they all have no horn. ({x & not-y} is empty AND {x & y} is empty.)

As I understand it, the existential fallacy is where a proposition with existential import is inferred illegitimately from a proposition with no existential import, e.g.

'All unicorns are horned'
Therefore
'Some unicorns are horned' — Virgo Avalytikh

Under normal circumstances you are right, but the puzzle indulges in multiple negatives. So though the truth of 'All unicorns are horned' has no existential import, its negation does. In Venn diagram terms, a universal (all or none) statement declares a region empty, but its negation declares that region populated. If not (all unicorns are horned), then there must be at least one hornless unicorn.

... how can energy go from either of these into the collective unconscious? — McMootch

The hunger of the lion becomes the stampede of the buffalo. Don't equate psyche's energy to physical energy; a powerful idea does not have a big engine or strong muscles. An appealing lie can lead to war.

Stay away from — god must be atheist

... bloody Morrisey. Self indulgent exploiter of the vulnerable, and all round shit.

I had to listen to some of that crap, damn you.

There is the moment, and the trauma one brings to it; at each moment there is the possibility of seeing the fragmentation, and seeing it, not from another fragment as observer, but fragmentation seeing itself - a whole seeing.

Well i am sitting here on my porch trying to think of what to say to that. — csalisbury

Well you have said a lot, but I will not answer just this...

I can't imagine how you can see the fragments as they are (as one is) - as fragmented, as the wave, not as one fragment observing - without some visitation of grace. — csalisbury

Let's just say that there is that possibility, and that it is not something willed or performed or achieved, but a visitation of grace, as you say, or if that is difficult, a natural phenomenon like the coalescing of drops of water, or the seeing of one scene with two eyes. Let's say there is no 'how' any more than there is an action to relaxation. One can prepare a little by doing whatever is necessary, and dropping whatever is not... make some space, get some rest, sow a little kindness...

Or if the poet insists on science, http://ift-malta.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-cybernetics-of-self-A-theory-of-alcoholism.pdf

I have often felt that the feeling of losing a loved one falls somewhere on a spectrum, at one end devastation and the other end emancipation and then a million points in between. — Hanover

Well it is rather like being left by one's lover, one can be liberated one can be imprisoned, one can be sad or glad, enraged, one can feel murderous towards the dead. One's relationship with the person has been complex, and it does not become simple in death; all these feelings mingle and rise up at different times.

When my father died, (I was 20) I wasn't much bothered, which is of course the most inappropriate of all. As if there is a feeling debt that ought to be paid. He was brought up a Wee Free, no toys on Sunday, Christian Miserablist, and became a Communist and then a good socialist. I guess he did well enough to live a peaceable life with wife and children through the war and pass on less trauma than he inherited.

I'm sure you know more about it than I do. — frank

I'm sure I know nothing at all about your feelings, I'm just trying to make sense of your posts.

Shut down means there's no emotion at all. It's bliss, btw. — frank

If there is no emotion, then what is shut down? I think you should watch the film again.

New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it a "remarkable picture" that was "a dark and haunting drama of a man who has reasonably eschewed a role of involvement and compassion in a brutal and bitter world and has found his life barren and rootless as a consequence. — your link

Bliss? I think not.

Because I didn't know how to deal with the deaths of those people, I shut down altogether like the Pawnbroker. — frank

Yes, the source, in general is trauma, and the shut down person is shut into the trauma and forever reliving it as flashback and recreating it out of the materials and characters of the present. Which explains why tyrants and abusers get elected by the traumatised.

poem about the cover-up, as a cover-up.

I mean what else can you do? — csalisbury

Uncover, dear boy. Does not Ashbury reveal the tragedy of the fragmentation of mind, and surely in the uncovering is the possibility of healing? Do you know if he ever wrote or spoke about being gay?

He was forever interrogating what it is to be in a moment with these facts and things and culture and feelings all existing at once, BUT in this interrogation was the enlightened recognition that we are not simply co-existing but are in relation to and, therefore, like a wave, affecting everyone and everything—and vice versa. He shows us how to be more fully, to inhabit each moment intentionally and consciously, to expand it, and he makes it look as easy as breathing, as if the air itself is alchemy, and we just need to relax, breathe it in and speak past the societal overlay of what is true towards otherwise:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/09/and-the-occassion-changed-a-tribute-to-john-ashbery

There is the moment, and the trauma one brings to it; at each moment there is the possibility of seeing the fragmentation, and seeing it, not from another fragment as observer, but fragmentation seeing itself - a whole seeing.

I'm sure we agree about all of this? — frank

Probably. Except...
When does anyone ignore the messenger of pain? I think only when something really important is going on, like a football match, or a ballet.
A baby screams about something, you don't know and they can't say, cold hot hungry tired bored frightened but whatever it turns out to be, they give a damn about that.

Is emotion a manifestation of something true and real about an organism? Maybe. It's depends.

Let's look at it physically, though. Is an expression of anger a powerful tool? — frank

I wonder if I can persuade you to un-ask these questions with a joke.

Q. What's the difference between a thermostat and a living being?
A. They both respond to temperature, but only life cares about it.

Giving a damn is not a manifestation of anything, it does not succeed or fail. It is the coin of experience.

I am mad at the landscape for reproaching me & I am mad at myself for having merited that reproach, but then I am also mad at you for making me feel that reproach anew. You can grow used to it after a while, alone, but what makes it sting is to have someone witness it. — csalisbury

Conflict at every level eh? But you know this is all nonsense right? The landscape does not reproach, you are not mad at, but indulge yourself, I cannot unfortunately make you feel, and the thing you hate most is to be alone.

These two, what you say and what I say, are conflicting stories, and I am only manifesting the 'other' side of the conflict that is already implicitly part of your story.

I'm sorry, I know this is deadly serious, let me put it very simply: this is not feeling, but the negation of feeling. It is the evasion of fear of pain, of humiliation, of loss, it is at its root, the deep sadness of a life unloved and un-lived. It is a simple thing covered with many layers to hide it. Never really felt or expressed, and so never finished.

The trees don't care. — Wallows

I wouldn't dare to speak for the trees, unless I was a poet. But I think they do care, as it goes.

But I was pointing to something more straightforward, that if one is depressed when one's experience is uplifting, then one is in some sense absent - not present with the trees and sunshine. Where are you then?

internalized anger — Wallows

The phrase comes easy but what does it mean? Are not all emotions internal until expressed?

"I am angry over being angry all the time." — Wallows

Are you really? It this a feeling or an idea? @csalisbury tells me a story I have heard before, of layers of feeling that are not 'about' the world as it is; the weight of depression that prevents one getting out of bed is nowhere in the bedroom, nowhere within experience therefore, but is a weight of thought. One is not in the bedroom oneself, but in a world of ideation, probably trapped there because ...

{I shouldn't say really, and deprive you of the wonderful working out that the poet glories in, but I can tell you this: }

... because the thought is never finished, it goes so far and then there is a jump, and then one comes back to the same place again, and again. Fear makes one jump.

Well, thought is similar to feeling in that it is uncontrollable. The only thing that we can control is our breathing. The rest just follows a cyclical pattern — Evil

I'd like to talk about control with you another time, but it seems bit out of place here. But in the meantime, consider the views of this fellow:
"Look at old unenlightened riding his bike and wobbling along the road. He thinks he is in control, but he cannot ride a straight-line and a traffic light can stop him. Not to mention the bomb I'm about to detonate under him."

What little feeling I've allowed myself has lead me to believe that my depression is really anger (turned inward, as the thinker said.) So that's what must be expressed, only that's a tricky one, because there are so many bad ways to express anger. And then the harrowingest thing is if if the anger in turn is really humiliation, or something worse ... — csalisbury

Right, this is the difficulty that Freud tried to deal with, and that every self-help guru has to deal with. One has insight, and so one does not merely feel, one sees one's feelings and comes to have feelings about them. And then feelings about those feelings. Until one is quite lost.

Come for a walk with me. We go up the road for ten minutes, and we're in a wooded public garden with paths meandering across the side of a steep hill, with flowers and shrubs and bits of rocky cliff, and steps every now and then to take us up a level. It's warm and sunny with a bit of wind, and as we labour up the hill, I ask you how you feel.

And you say, "I'm depressed, but I think my depression is really anger, but the anger might be about humiliation, or something worse."

And I say, "Is it the trees? Or maybe the steps, that upset you?"

Is the same true for thought? — Evil

I don't know, why do you ask?

Even more so in this thread, I need to speak for myself...

I recall the unenlightened of yore, a youngish single heterosexual male with __ a strong sense that the next woman I met I might have to spend the rest of my life looking after. This was before swipe left swipe right, when feelings had consequences and thus meaning. It was a condition where 'looking for the one' and 'looking out for her' were united in a sense that every step was crucial and every moment eternal. In the life of passion there is no going back, and every smile is for keeps, every harsh word a murder.

A passionate man is a quiet man.

1, 2, both, neither, or all of the above? — csalisbury

It's a great temptation to answer the question, but if you consider

... whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

... you will see it is impossible. There are beautiful and ugly feelings perhaps, if you want to speak so, there are real and unreal feelings certainly I would say. It's not a solution but a warning. One might misunderstand this lauding of feeling to be an exhortation to 'let it all hang out' rather than as an invitation to fifteen years of hard psychological self-questioning.

I do have a theory about depression, but I want to talk about feeling not theory here. Express your depression dudes, don't whinge about it in the usual abstract hopeless comfortable way. At the moment you are talking about each other, or Churchill's black dog; Eeyore does it better.

Myself, I am almost never depressed. I am often frightened, sad , angry, if you want to consider ugliness, but my concern in this is to inject some seriousness into an affect poor world, of philosophy of science and of politics. They all seem to be full of cheap sensation, but ultimately flat and devoid of meaningful passion. A bunch of wankers having sex with robots for no reason.

A gracious silence or a bit of regret — T Clark

You completely ignored the gracious silence, so...

What great pity it is that everyone is not so unfailingly cheerful, respectful, polite, sane and interesting as me. It is not their fault or the moderators' fault, just a regrettable fact of life.

What if I said, that the politics of the right will always have an advantage due to unwritten laws like Zionism or some divine rationale? Is this sensible? — Wallows

Well I'm not that great an economist, but if one shop always has an advantage because *whatever*, the other shop will always go bankrupt. Perhaps that has already happened in the US, and you don't have a 2 party democracy at all, but a plutocracy with propaganda. Amusingly, that is exactly the same as Russia and China ...

It occurs to me that democracy requires a general level of sanity. But I must avoid jumping on my favourite hobby-horse in your thread.

Politics is also about moving the centre, not just occupying it.
— unenlightened

Before I build a straw-man, please do elaborate on this. — Wallows

I'm not sure I can, very much. But let's say that at the extremes of left and right there are views that cannot be espoused without penalty. So on one side, McCarthyism seeks to delegitimise and penalise the 'far left', and on the other, Trumpism seeks to rehabilitate the 'far right'. Both if successful have the effect of moving the centre to the right.

So rather than move my shop to the middle, I might do better to demolish some houses at your end of town and build some new ones at my end, and then the middle will move to my shop. That way you become the extremist and I become the moderate and also have the consistent and stable position through all these changes...

Does or should Hotelling's Law apply to potential democratic candidates-who would want to win, quite obviously-against Trump in 2020? — Wallows

Yes. And it provides stability; we like stability.

But there must be other factors involved. Taking the beach analogy, the beach has a fixed length and thus a fixed centre; not so the political spectrum. The limits of the political spectrum are set by something like 'what custom finds acceptable'. Thus in America anything that is thought of as 'socialism' which I think is opposed to 'individualism', is not on the beach at all but way up on the cliffs where no one goes. Whereas in Europe, - well it's going the same way, but it certainly used to be that anything like Trumpism was way up the cliff at the other end of the beach where no one had been since the fascists were defeated inWW2. Politics is also about moving the centre, not just occupying it. You don't necessarily have to bomb one end of the beach to move the centre, a stink bomb will get folks moving, or a sewage outflow.

Anyways, identity is ritual, and ritual has this property of great stability and great ability to transform. Likewise a society can be immune to the influence of the individual and totally sensitive to the influence of the individual. The difference between an eccentric and a trend-setter is whether or not the time is propitious.

So we can think in terms of "what are the worst/best effects of this system and how can we act to stabilise our community/agriculture/relationship from it or grow from it?" rather than "i need to find a butterfly lever to pull to make everything right again". — fdrake

That'll do for me. The aim is to get away from the mechanical model, so the harder it is to find the levers the better. Or perhaps I could say, following Isherwood, 'I am a lever' not a puller of levers.

I went quiet for a bit becauseI ran into the old 'whereof one cannot think, thereof one must stop posting' thing. There's a lot of interesting stuff been posted, so I shall ignore it all, and decline to answer any questions.

But I am going to stick to this; newness entails unknownness. And it seems to me that there is no easier way to predict a complex world than to run it - or live it, because those damn butterflies keep making tornados...

So the unknown is always with us alongside the aspects of predictability. With and within. So if I can get my butterflies to flap their wings just so, and give you the insight you need, then the world will be transformed.

But I am not talking about hallucination especially as cultural sanction is already an hallucination, by hypothesis. I think it has already been pointed out that the distinction real/unreal does not function here. @Evil's revolutionary meme must inevitably eat itself.

But what interests me is that what is implied is a radical freedom. Addiction can be, not overcome, but in some judo move, dissolved. And that includes the addiction to fossil fuel, to weapons and power, and so on. One does not have to go on being depressed, and suffering. Any time you want, you can walk out of your front door, and never come back.

One interesting question is that if dream entities do indeed have an intent of their own, then what is their goal or 'desire' to get out of interactions with them? What do you think? — Wallows

Another interesting question is what they get up to while you're awake and unconscious of them.

I don't "believe" in dream interpretation -- like using a chart which lists what images "mean". Like "a thing is a phallic symbol if it's longer than it's wide"***. That's just malarky. A better method of interpretation is to teach the dreamer to "free associate" to the images. In my dream, for instance, what images, or ideas, or feelings do the 'files" or "Marian Hall" bring to mind. "Files" bring to mind feelings of frustration and unease. "Marian Hall" brings to mind a feeling of security, belonging. (I'm not, never was, Catholic.). — Bitter Crank

FWIW then, recurrent dreams are often related to very earliest experiences. Marion Hall as womb with complicated access, therefore, disorganising files as contractions, sending clients oft another room as birth, them coming back as awaking to the world.

If that doesn't feel right, it probably isn't, but unpleasant dreams that repeat are likely to be about early trauma, and birth is an early trauma.