to conflate our subjective perspective with objective truth, — Shatter

This is a purely metaphorical duality, surely? As such, it seems to be a dangerous one.

You should look into the I Ching. You don't have to decide on the exact specification of the primary duality; the usual translation is male/creative v female receptive, where creative has a positive aspect and receptive more so a negative one, though not exactly. But the great thing about the system is that everything changes, so @fdrake's molluscs can be catered for too.

And it would be quite within the tradition to suggest that the zeitgeist, as it were, is moving towards the feminine at the moment, and exactly how it is doing it, in terms of the order of the changes in hexagram representations, will be crucial in any judgement of the changes.

I'm just not interested in the point you have so convincingly demonstrated.

Ok dude.Goal scored. Congratulations.

Sure, it was. Earth belongs to life, and life belongs to Earth in a reciprocal relation. I fence off my garden and dispossess you the people and also the rabbits, without your or their permission. As long as you also have your garden, and the rabbits have theirs, no one will make a big fuss. But once we greedy buggers have fenced off the whole world, there is likely to be some trouble. But not, unfortunately, from the white rhino.

What is property? Property is theft.
— charleton
"Theft" implies taking someone else's property. If property is theft, then who is being stolen from? — Arkady

Private property is stolen from the commons.

I don't think it is a weapon shortage that is causing that.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/22/andrei-zheleznyakov-soviet-scientist-poisoned-novichok?CMP=fb_gu

Here's the use of the word the American Dream: — René Descartes

What that seems to indicate is the moment when it stopped being the American Reality.

I think the morality of capitalism depends on there being a frontier. As long as there are untapped resources out there, the accumulation of property cannot be said to be depriving anyone. We all slave on @Jamalrob's estate here, but if anyone feels unhappy, they are free to carve out their own philosophical homestead further down the internet highway.

But there is no land left to clear; no free space to invest my labour in and grow my food and my capital. The landless peasant is doomed to remain forever landless, because all the land is already owned. And at this stage it becomes apparent and significant that to own property is to deprive others of its use.

So then, not only must one pay for the social enforcement of property rights through police, army, justice system, etc, one also ought to pay compensation to those one has deprived of the world. This is called Socialism, and it is not opposed to the morality of private property, but is a modification of it that responds to reaching the limits of the frontier of freedom.

Someone mentioned recently that data is the new oil. Oil was a new untapped resource available to anyone prepared to get their hands dirty, and then it wasn't any more. It turns out that data is likewise a finite resource, and has lead to monopolies in the same way. And data, it seems to me, really is the final frontier; once we have exploited our own psyches, there is nowhere else to go.

And is it also obvious that service in the military is immoral? — Hanover

When you are asking, clearly not. Because that is what we call a rhetorical question.

Obviously not. To ask is already to know that. Unfortunately, designing wheelchairs is less well paid, so you have to decide how much your moral integrity is worth to you, and whether you want to sell it at any price.

I'm reminded of certain usually American, typically psychology and self help books that have such a coded structure, using fonts and layout: bullet points, exposition, case histories, advice, all quarantined from each other in separate sections of bold, or italics or enlarged print.

I don't much like it, because it seems like an attempt to impose an appearance of structure on material that is actually wooly and confused; to make waffle seem like argument and science. But for one's own purposes in trying to absorb material and organise one's thoughts - 'whatever gets you through the night.' Just don't make your ink colours into an ontology.

Well in terms of making a stash, becoming president, and such, one can go a long way on crutches; in a sense they are crutches. (see Alice Miller) In terms of making a grand contribution to theoretical physics, or composing a masterpiece of music or art, there's no substitute for having a special talent. But to be a decent human being involves being 'dragged up proper'. Hawking was fortunate to have a huge talent in an area that he could pursue despite his illness. I don't know, but I predict from his ability to sustain a positive outlook in the face of such an appalling disability that he had a really good sustaining upbringing. If I am wrong about that, then his achievement is even more remarkable.

In your view, what is the key to this mental resilience & mental energy? — Agustino

I have no doubt at all that a secure, free, and happy childhood is the master key. If one is loved and nurtured and cherished throughout one's formation, then one has the resources to tackle any challenge. For want of that, one has to rely on crutches of various sorts, none of which are entirely adequate.

All this does is obscure the "something coming from nothing" problem. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think you need at least to be more respectful to these ideas, that have been thought through very carefully by folks much cleverer than me.

Consider a square 10 pixels to a side, consisting of equal numbers of red and blue pixels. Start with a highly ordered state, where all the red pixels are at the top. This ordered state can be specified by a list:
RRRRR... up to fifty, and then BBBBB... up to 100.

Compare this with a totally disordered state; the same pixels in a completely random configuration. Now, I cannot specify the state other than by giving the full list, whereas the ordered state was specified above in half a line. To the extent that there is order, one can say something like "and so on" by way of abbreviation This is the principle that file compression works on, and a maximally compressed file is maximally disordered.

Entropy, and thus the arrow of time then falls out of information theory as a statistical law, that for any isolated system that is changing, it is more likely to become more disordered than more ordered to the extent that there are more disorderly possibilities than orderly ones. Swap the colours of a random red and blue pixel, and disorder is introduced. Repeat until a completely disordered state is reached, and then carry on until an ordered state obtains again. Don't hold your breath for this last bit.

There seems to be a conflation of ideas here that don't quite relate. The sense I make of Stalin's quote is that empathy is always individual - I feel for you; I cannot feel for you if I am feeling for someone else, because I am only one person and can only have one feel at a time. It's not a question of turning down the volume so much as being distracted. The million people are conceptual, I never experience them, and cannot empathise with a concept.

Now consider the surgeon. In order to do his job of cutting your flesh with care, he has to turn off his empathy. We don't want him wincing and bursting into tears every time he uses the scalpel. It's not a question of how many people he is operating on. One might say that empathy is an emotion, whereas caring is an action motivated by empathy, but not necessarily accompanied by it.

And then we have the title: If nothing matters (to God), I still care about whatever I care about, which is not everything, but might be quite a lot. So my empathy is for the op who cares about the sort of thing I care about, but is having some difficulty in clarifying things conceptually, and my action is to write something that uses the scalpel of analysis, hopefully with enough skill to assist anyone who cares to consider the matter.

Yeah, that. So much more understandable than what I said, not. So life can accumulate stored energy as wood coal and oil by utilising the sun's energy which is dissipating much faster.

The bit that is harder to get my head around, though is the idea that complexity and disorder are somehow the same, and the nearest I can get to this is in terms of information. To the extent that information is patterned or structured, it can be compressed by specifying the structure. So the maximum information density is the same as random. Somehow this is equivalent to the energy thing, because it is the structure in the distribution of energy that allows for some 'free energy' to be released in it's dissipation.

That's much clearer now isn't it?

I think the broken glass is more complex than the unbroken. We are in the realm of entropy here: symmetry breaking, increasing disorder and increasing complexity. I need to do a bit of homework about the way life functions, but a first guess is that it uses available energy to make something of an eddy in the entropic flow increasing it globally but reversing it locally. Which might or might not relate to the order/disorder question of @JJJJS

Do you agree that the coherency of the story is a function of continuity? If you are telling the story of how a butterfly comes to be from a caterpillar, for example, and there is a break in your continuity, something unaccounted for in that break, then there is a problem with the story at that point. A critical analysis of the story will indicate that something has come from nothing at that point in the story. The new part is not accounted for by a rearrangement of the old parts, perhaps it's an electron or something like that, which has come from energy, and energy is not a part of any particular thing. A part comes into existence from energy and this cannot be described as a rearrangement of parts. — Metaphysician Undercover

Here's a story. A brick with kinetic energy X hits a sheet of glass and the energy is transmitted from the brick to the glass causing lines of fracture to radiate outwards from the point of impact. The exact arrangement of those lines becomes more unpredictable as the glass becomes more uniform. The glass will break, but exactly where it will break is unknowable.

This incompleteness is not incoherent. Energy is acting, but the unpredictable novelty is not what either of us mean by 'creative'. Or is it exactly that same creativity of the mind, but mindless? I'm not sure.

I have to say that it would be a huge risk / gamble if it is false flag from those two countries. Just imagine that the attack failed, or the attacker got captured - great international scale disaster! On the other hand, if it is true flag, it seems somewhat more plausible to me. — Agustino

I agree. It would be less risky though with UK government or at least intelligence cooperation, but the fact that it makes perfect sense as a Russian operation that benefits the Russian government rather speaks against it being in the interests of any enemy of Russia at least. I assume that anyone capable cannot also be politically naive.

If you want to go really conspiratorial, you might start asking who benefits from increasing global conflict, and come up with a hypothetical cabal of arms dealers, allied with techy survivalists who think that a nuclear conflict would be just the thing to deal with an excess of population that is no longer needed in the age of 3d printing and robotics.

Whether the flag was true or false, it seems clear that it was a big red flag, and the flag was 'Russian'. It is surely undeniable that whoever had the resources to use a nerve agent, also had the resources to assassinate Skripal more surely and quietly. A message was being sent. So an important consideration in developing a theory about who sent the message is what message has been sent. One might also want to consider why such a message would be timely.

I think there is a strong message to any and every Russian abroad that they are not safe from the attentions of their home country if they speak or act against it. This might have timely application to any Russian who was considering cooperation with any of the Russiagate investigations.

There is also a message to Russians at home that their government is able to take action internationally with impunity. This seems largely unnecessary, though it is election time.

Then there is a general message to the world in general that Russia is dangerous, ruthless, violent and so on.

Are there other messages any of you are getting?

So candidates for a false flag operation are anyone who wants to prevent Russiagate scandals from being exposed, or anyone who wants to foment anti-Russian feeling, but with the limitation that they must have some kind of access to, or capability of manufacturing, the nerve agent and delivering it.

Who comes to mind?

Just to annoy people, and confirm my status as postmodern neo-marxist pervert, here's a brief waffle about a form of conflict theory that has stuck in my mind unaccompanied by a theorist's name. It seems pertinent to current politics, and possibly even this very debate.

The general idea is that whenever two or three are gathered together there will be conflict. And this is the nature of society, world without end amen. But in a stable society, which is about as good as it gets, the conflict is largely internalised. This can happen because the individual has many identifications, of religion, class, ethnicity, etc. So in the stable society, these identifications are orthogonal to each other; they are independent variables. So you and I might have the same religion, but different ethnicity, and class, whereas me and Mr Smith, share the same ethnicity, but differ as to religion and class, and you and Mr Smith share the same class but differ in religion and ethnicity. In this situation, all our alliances are conflicted, depending on the issue, such that one's opponent in one thread is one's ally in another. And this, believe it or not is a recipe for peace and tranquility, because no one wants to destroy another, because everyone is an ally on some issue.

Rather, it is when these identities are aligned with each other, and the classic case is N Ireland, that violence breaks out. In this case, if you are protestant, you are middle class, loyalist and ethnically Scots, whereas if you are catholic, you are working class, republican, and ethnically Irish. And this is a recipe for civil war, precisely because the identities are so aligned and produce a loyalty that is undivided, and a conflict that is completely externalised.

Now what seems to have happened to us recently is that all our conflicts have been either aligned or reduced to a single conflict (wealth). "It's the economy, stupid". Identities are becoming polarised, and this is the recipe for internal harmony and external conflict, we all know who our friends and enemies are, and they are always the same. One of the signs of this alignment is the multi-dimensional epithet: 'Alt-right Christian fundamentalist neo-liberal' vs pomo neo-marxist identity obsessed bleeding heart atheists.

Our identity is fine, your identity is suspect, their identity is outrageous.

I think a common error along the way, which (fairly or unfairly, I can't say at this point) I'm seeing as exemplified in gurugeorge's responses, is to make this conceptual generalisation of identity politics while still treating identity politics in a more derogatory sense. All politics as identity politics, all identity politics as mere identity politics. — fdrake

Well I think it is more so exemplified in the oppressed themselves, at least that is where it becomes paradoxical. One can say that women are underrepresented in positions of power without claiming that women are better than men, or that a woman politician cannot e a bad politician. One can support the decolonisation of Africa without pretending that Idi Amin was something other than an insane genocidal tyrant.

The difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich have more money, not that they are more greedy. There is something to the notion of virtue signalling when, say, people claim that Hilary Clinton has a claim to the presidency by virtue of being a woman - that is no virtue.

But that is not to deny also the virtue signalling of those who identify as 'responsible individualists who do not whine all the time'.

I vaguely remember that you see all politics as identity politics. — fdrake

Yes. It seems to me that what is objected to is always the identifications of the oppressed. It is not confederations of business people, gated communities, millionaires clubs, armies, nations, etc.

Well, people will be incentivized to simulate oppression even when they’re actually oppressed. And the flimsy film of performative oppression will fire up detractors and lend credence to their false cause.

This is the problem of teaching expression of oppression. The form itself corrupts and devalues the very real content. If everyone who reads the nyt loves the bluest eye, then the bluest eye had been castrated.

If you are content with letting someone recognize your suffering (even if you hold that they cant actually recognize it, and are constitutively incapable of it) you've ceded something. — csalisbury

There is a danger to identification as oppressed, and the man to go to for its deep analysis is Franz Fanon. But to put it into a handy slogan, I could say, "there is no virtue in being oppressed".

This means that whenever the oppressed come together to resist and end their oppression, they are aiming to dissolve their identity - the basis of their own collective power. And if they are not intent on undermining their identity as oppressed, they are intent on maintaining it.

When I was young I didn't like history much, but now that I am mostly history, I have much more respect for it.

Curiously, the roots of communism are also the roots of American independence.

So you see class politics as an example of identity politics? — fdrake

I see party politics as identity politics.

In other news, the word 'dispute' used to have the emphasis on the second syllable in line with 'discard' and 'dismiss', and out of line with discord. But thanks to the tireless efforts of one man, Arthur Scargill, it has seemingly irrevocably changed allegiance. That's what you can expect more of with the triumph of Postmodern neo-Marxism, so don't pretend you haven't been warned.

The word 'tremendously' is tremendously important and valuable and I am tremendously fond of it. Unfortunately, due to quantitive easing, it now means 'very slightly'.

Origin
Mid 17th century: from Latin tremendus (gerundive of tremere ‘tremble’) + -ous. — oxford dictionaries.com

Everyone loves a gerundive, surely?

Look to the roots.

Communist states feature highly in both massacres and deaths from avoidable famine. Fascist states have committed the largest single atrocities. Colonialism features most highly if you take the upper estimates (estimates are wide because no-one really knew the starting population). — Pseudonym

One might almost think that there is a commonality of regime change, and fragility of power structures that leads to massacres. As if those in power do not relinquish it voluntarily...

What if I could, on a regular basis, cure certain forms of cancer just using my mind? Would you call that a miracle? — Agustino

I was thinking about miracle cures myself in the meantime. I think if you could do it on a regular* basis, and the placebo effect couldn't account for it, I would have to take it seriously as either a miracle or some unknown process of telekinesis or something. The problem with such miracles is that what is actually done on a regular basis does not seem to be anything inexplicable. I'd be much more impressed if you could restore lost limbs, but that doesn't happen at Lourdes, or at any faith healer's session I've heard of.

Why do you think moral significance is important for something to count as a miracle? Maybe I just walk on water to impress my friends, is that any less miraculous than if I, say, walked on water to save someone from drowning? If so, how come? — Agustino

I don't have a good explanation for thinking that at the moment; perhaps it's a little miracle.

* 'regular' is an arguable ambiguity here.

Where I think there is something much more interesting than all these 'what ifs' is in subjectivity itself; arguably, the everyday miracle is the (potential) freedom of the human spirit from its own conditioning.

If I say I'm going to flip a coin 20 times and 20 times in a row get tails, and I do it, someone could always claim that it was random if they so wish. The possibility is always there. One requires understanding in order to truly discern this matter. — Agustino

It's a one in a million chance, give or take. So the circumstances matter. If you were doing that twenty times a day for ten years and getting it wrong every other time, I'd think you got lucky; or if it was a craze that millions of people were doing, then again I'd think you got lucky, in the same way as I'm not surprised when someone wins the lottery. OTOH, if you could do it on a regular basis, I'd think it was conditioned by your skill in flipping, or in some sleight of hand.

For me to want to declare a miracle, not only would these things have to be ruled out, but also there would have to be some other circumstance that made the occurrence morally significant. Turning water into wine down the pub on Saturday night to impress your mates doesn't count as a miracle merely as inexplicable, but doing it at a wedding feast in the moment of crisis does.

I'd like to follow Hume down his rabbit hole a bit. Elsewhere, in his sceptical discussion of causation, he notes that the laws of nature are derived from past experience of regularities, and, though he doesn't put it this way, descriptive rather than prescriptive. He concludes that there can be nothing in the laws of nature that dictate the future; this is the problem of induction that I like to summarise as 'you can't get a will be from a has been'.

Accordingly, in looking at the past, one is looking at nature, and in noticing regularities one is calling them laws. So in noticing irregularities in the past one says, either there is a regularity that we haven't penetrated yet because it is complicated, or else that there is no regularity, and we have randomness.

As to the future, there is nothing that can possibly be a violation of the laws of nature because there is no law (derived from the past) that can tell us that the future will be like the past.

And as to the past, there is nothing that can possibly be a violation of nature, because if there is a violation, then that is not the law as the regularity is not regular.

None of which is to deny that weird shit might have happened, and weird shit might happen in the future. So it's not, as it turns out very helpful, because in ruling out miracles, nothing whatsoever is ruled out.

In order to be saying something more than 'I don't want to use that word', one has to give 'miracle' a meaning such that it is not ruled out a priori, but is the kind of thing that there could be as a logical possibility, but that there isn't (or is) as a matter of fact.

However, one can take another view, and find another definition. Let us say instead, that the laws of nature describe the orderly succession of events, such that the present is conditioned by the past. Now if the laws of nature are complete, and the succession is entirely orderly, then if, the big bang then I write this post. That is, initial conditions + physics determine history.

But that is an old-fashioned notion, because randomness seems to be built in. And randomness in radioactive decay, for example, seems to be unconditioned by the past.

But there is a logical possibility, I think, of something that is unconditioned by the past and non-random, and that would be a reasonable definition of a miracle, I think. It is difficult, because if it is not conditioned by the past, it would appear to be random - I'm not entirely sure if there is a way of telling, and if there is in principle no way of our distinguishing the non-random unconditioned event from the random event, then there is no way of answering the question of whether there are miracles or not. Nevertheless, I think the definition gets close to what folks want to mean by a miracle, and if it still leaves it open as to whether they happen or not, that is in accordance with the fact that fairly sensible people can disagree about it.

I think, finally, that if there is any criterion for distinguishing the random from the miraculous, it must lie in the meaning/significance of the event. But that is a can of worms for another day, or another poster.

Does the caterpillar rearrange itself to make a butterfly? Do mom and dad rearrange themselves to make a baby? — Metaphysician Undercover

Well yes, the caterpillar does exactly the same thing in millions of cases and over millions of years. Not mum and dad, but their genes are rearranged to make a 'new' individual. In that sense, a fully deterministic system allows for change, and if you add a salting of randomness, evolution in the full sense can get going, producing not only new individuals but new species.

So even the idea that there ought to be one coherent story is misleading, a misunderstanding, because any story glosses over, obscures all of the creativity, the things coming from nothing, in order that it be a coherent story. And the origins, creativity must be accounted for by something other than a story. — Metaphysician Undercover

An account is a story. 'A caterpillar turns into a butterfly' accounts for a butterfly in terms of a prior caterpillar. So the mystic is pointing to creativity, and saying that if there is creativity, there can be no account of it, because all accounts are of how the past became the present, or projections of how the present will be in the future and creativity simply is what is not accounted for by the past. Hence 'it comes from nothing' does not count as an account, but as a denial of accountability.

But this idea of a first, a something coming from nothing seems rather repugnant to me. It seems unreasonable to me, to think that something could come from nothing. That's why when you described being creative, and original, as producing something from nothing, I turned to the inner instinct and intuition, imagination, to say that it didn't really come from nothing. So when I turn to the evolutionary memory, the DNA, and think about the first, the original life on earth, I don't think of this as something coming from nothing. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is certainly an odd notion I have, but there is a logic that I find persuasive. If something 'comes from' somewhere, it is not new, but merely a rearrangement and continuation of the old; this is the dictatorship of the reasonable, and it governs much of our lives, and much of the universe. But if that is all there is, then it seems to me there can be no freedom, one is reduced to a cog in the deterministic machine. DNA arises from the shuffling of the molecular cards, man arises from the shuffling of the genetic cards, and the theory of relativity arises from the shuffling of the conceptual cards. It leaves consciousness without any function, because choice and decision has to presume freedom.

So it seems to me that even if it is not true, the story we tell of ourselves must necessarily include our freedom, and freedom means unconditioned by the past, just as determined means determined by the past. It's curious how a discussion of consciousness involves these other philosophical strands of time and determinism...

Well it was the thread - that is to say the topic - that I identified as trollish, and then only when I was invoked.

And that is because the short answer to the question 'What is scientism?' is that it is a term of abuse. It is something one is accused of, not something one espouses. And if no one espouses a philosophy, no one is in a position to seriously explicate it. So what is left to talk about except the personal failings of the contributors? Which is what seems to have happened. now if you want to plead innocence of trollishness, and at the same time complain about the bad feeling that has been produced, then you might be well advised to try and learn the lessons, and set up future discussions rather more carefully with a substantial topic.

I use scientific results and ways of thinking to make a cup of coffee every morning. But I think I decided last time I looked at it unscientifically that this was a troll thread, so I'll let y'all manage without my reading it all and applying my art and science. :wink:

I agree that all of the stories enter through the senses, but don't you think that there is a part of consciousness which is not a story? What about instinct and intuition? Things come to consciousness through these sources, and I don't think that this is a story, nor do I think that what comes to consciousness from intuition and instinct, comes through the senses. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well yes I do. There is a point at which I step back from scientism, and even philosophism, and resort to mysticism. One might say that the whole human, as a general form that has this connection to the world through senses and a propensity and capacity to form narratives from the interactions of memory and senses, comes from the 'static' (in relation to the individual) memory of DNA, an evolutionary memory. So the first story is written in the body and brain, and tells the story of the story-teller. That is instinct and intuition as I see them, and nothing mystical there.

But I think that there must first be an inner capacity to make sense of things, and this inner capacity allows us to construct things from what we perceive with the senses. That is why I would rather place the "inner" aspect of consciousness as prior to the sensing aspect. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is when you use the words 'capacity', 'freedom', and 'creativity' that I start to reach my mystical singularity, where stories must end as explanations, and where they come from. Everything one can know, everything one can grasp, everything that makes sense, comes from the past, and this is the physicalist story that is all stories - almost. But we know, as part of that story, that the past is inadequate to the future; we know too that the emptiness of the vacuum is seething with activity.

So there is a capacity, an emptiness, that is capable of originating the new at any moment, and there can be no explanation of it, because an explanation would relate it to the past and it is new, original. Not the capacity is new, it is always there, but what comes from it comes from nothing, and that is what makes it original and creative. It is not thought, not memory, not sensation, though it functions through all of these. Let's call it 'consciousness', as it appears in humans.

Let's have a chat about Milankovitch cycles. Be aware that we are not dealing in mere centuries here, so they won't explain anything sudden, like.