I won't take your bet, because I'm a stranger and you're local and you might know that the ferry just docked and we're due a contingent of Rhode Islanders. Instead, I'll throw you what I hope is a more substantial lifeline/timeline.

So, imagine a world where the future is not always like the past.

You are watching a film, Death in Venice, say, and somewhere in the middle, it cuts to the middle of Bambi, and then it starts jumping every frame to a different movie, so that there is just a meaningless flicker of images changing without connection and too fast to even identify.

But there is still a continuity, which is the person watching.

So now remove that continuity, such that each frame, is seen by a different person. Now there is no continuity, but there is a problem: without any continuity, there is nothing to say one frame comes before or after another; there is no temporal order of past and future, just a heap of random watchers of random frames with no connection at all.

In other words, if the future fails to be connected to the past and related to it, it fails to be the future. The future is necessarily similar to the past, otherwise it is not the future. The timeline has to hold together, or else it is broken, and a broken timeline is not a timeline at all.

So, what’s the problem? — T Clark

The problem is that it is not rational, in the sense that no amount of past evidence can constrain the future in any way, logically. And you just saying it seems rational does not make it so either. It goes something like this:

The future will be similar to the past because in the past, the future was usually similar to the past, and the future will be similar to the past, because it generally was in the past, so it will be in the future.
Repeat without rinsing until convinced.

The doubt is justified on similar grounds. Might we be like the turkey? You might "remember" the sun always rising, but in virtue of what do you know that your memory is reliable? Plus, given Hume's disjoint bundle anthropology, the reliability of memory is perhaps more open to doubt. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is it? Do you doubt it on any of those grounds? Want to put some money on it? :wink:

This is Wittgenstein's suggestion. There might be reasons such as these on particular occasions and in particular circumstances. But because my memory is sometimes unreliable does not mean that I can or should never rely on it, because even the interpretation of immediate sense data relies on memory, and thus there is nothing at all without it. And Hume is similarly complacent in practice about such matters.

I don't see the value in this kind of distinction. How do you see it? — T Clark

You don't see the value of the distinction between rational and irrational? Or memory and imagination?

:gasp:

Huh? Your statistical claim makes no sense, but anyway statistics cannot answer Hume, whose argument comes down to 'you can't logically derive a proposition about the future from propositions about the past, just as his moral scepticism states that 'you cannot get an ought from an is.'

Given every morning of my life (that's more than 1,000) the sun has risen. Habit leads me to expect it to rise tomorrow. Now justify the doubt. Something like "I saw the devourer of suns starting to consume it last evening", perhaps?

The nearest thing to an answer to Hume comes from Wittgenstein, along the lines that doubt too stands in need of justification. Whatever can be known can be doubted and knowing and doubting both need justification. Can one justify the doubt that the sun might not rise in the morning? One can say that it might not, but can one really doubt it?

I think it is our business to distinguish sense from nonsense. I do not think it can be done without touching on nonsense. I suspect the line between laidback and stupid is even more difficult to navigate without getting one's mind dirty.

Here's something to make you glad you live in the fucked up US, God-forsaken Europe, or the La-la land of the UK. This is the real Big Brother.

I have to be charitable and conclude that you only mean to prove my thesis with this little display of uptight contrariety. So thank you. :up: — apokrisis

Well thank you for the reluctant charity. I certainly don't claim to be the incarnation of love, and my use of quotation rather than simple declaration might even suggest that to the charitable. But your suggestion

Still, instantiations such as the latter cases of rape do attest to the fact that some adult humans become utterly immune to it. Love is to them a false promise, hence an utter falsity, hence a wrong reality to uphold, or, more simply, a wrong. Notwithstanding, duly agreed with the proposition: (universal) love is that which makes the world go round. — javra

There is no place in the attraction between electron and proton for consent or dissent. The love of the rapist is the love of power which is the love of the feeble. Since 'love' is somewhat a trigger word, it seems, I will back-track to 'like'. One cannot object to 'like' with any vehemence surely?

'Kangaroos like to hop'. @apokrisis likes to disdain. Systems like to dissipate.

Any minute now I'm going to invent the law of attraction, so I'll stop while I still can.

Dichotomies. Always there lurking to bite you on the philosophical bum! — apokrisis

Herewith the lurking dichotomous bum biting alternative:

You can see it but you can’t see it. — apokrisis

Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
'Cause you don't love me any more — Skeeter Davis

Love makes the world go round, which nobody can deny who is born of two parents.

Say, what is the spell, when her fledgelings are cheeping,
That lures the bird home to her nest?
Or wakes the tired mother, whose infant is weeping,
To cuddle and croon it to rest?
What the magic that charms the glad babe in her arms,
Till it cooes with the voice of the dove?
'Tis a secret, and so let us whisper it low—
And the name of the secret is Love!
For I think it is Love,
For I feel it is Love,
For I'm sure it is nothing but Love! — Lewis Carrol

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." — John Keats

We’ve heard like nothing about any resistance, which is very odd. If Russia is so incompetent on the battlefield, wouldn’t their corruption and incompetence spill over into intelligence as well? Making it more likely to actually be able to organize an underground resistance — Christoffer

I guess the corruption and incompetence soaks in to the underground too. Or to put it a bit more sociologically, nazi Germany had another culture, and was close to going socialist/communist instead of to the nazis at that time. Russia has never really had the luxury of a bilateral culture in 'peaceful conflict' aka a democratic culture. The path in Russia is from incompetent dictator to collapse to anarchic struggles to competent dictator to incompetent dictator to collapse ....

My reference was to @NOS4A2 claim elsewhere that anyone could say anything because it was just words. Thus becoming inflamed at someone's words is entirely voluntary and should not lead to censure let alone censorship.

Not my own position. But my position in general is that the right to free speech is not the same as the right to free broadcast or publication. We appear here, or not, at the whim of the site owner and the running dogs he allows to control his territory. That's the constitutional position, and if folks want to change the constitution, or change the site owner, they have some work to do that won't be done by posting on this site - if you see what I mean.

ABC and Disney ended Kimmel because their local affiliates refused to air his inflammatory episode. — NOS4A2

Words? Infammatory? Have you seen the light and converted or something?

OK, this is definitely the Woo department, and I'm not sure how far down the rabbit hole I want to fall. But when a chap has to declare some commercial interests at the end of their woo, well that's interesting ...

What is its true function?
— Roke

To reduce violence and make ordinary people safer. — unenlightened

You’re saying this is the intended function or the actual function? — Roke

No. I'm saying it's the true function.

Are you deliberately fucking about, or is it just incompetence?

Meanwhile, in another part of the catastrophe:

This is not a very happy video. But Ukraine is losing more slowly than Russia. Not very consoling, really.

your not being here would profoundly matter. — Hanover

Well I totally wasn't fishing for compliments, but I expect you are, so - the feeling is entirely mutual. Nothing wrong with our mirrors, eh? Like a little echo chamber of love and admiration, we are.

One's existence is in the eye of the beholder, which in turn is reflected in the interpretation of one's own existent sense of being and becoming. — Jack Cummins

I'm not treating your topic with the respect it and you deserve; my apologies. But there is a sense in which your question is too profound to be approached directly. One retreats into theory, depersonalisation, or humour, because, according to one tradition, it is calling for The Last Judgement. It is said that at death, one's whole life passes before one, and one makes for oneself the judgement of one's worth. At that moment there is nothing to win or lose, and all the bias falls away and one makes the naked judgement from the position of full knowledge and impartiality. I'm afraid the almost universal report card from my school days still applies: "Could do better if he tried."

It wouldn't affect me in the slightest if I didn't exist; but look at all the pearls of wisdom the forum would be lacking! A tragedy to contemplate and thank providence we have avoided.

What would it be called if we weren’t caught in an Orwell-adjacent bizarro world? — Roke

A bullshit reduction measure.

What is its true function? — Roke

To reduce violence and make ordinary people safer.

The cat, as a stand-in for Wigner's friend, is presumably aware that it is not dead. — Banno

I'm not sure. Either I have never been in such a superposition, or I have but was not aware. Either way it is not clear to me that it cannot be or that my consciousness would in that case not function to collapse the superposition from within. Obviously in such cases, only the supercats that collapse into life will live to tell the tale, and those that collapse into death will not. Which is a bit problematic for the collapse. If the superposition of the cat is real. then the cat is aware that it is alive and simultaneously not aware that it is dead. Now Wigner's friend in a gas mask might collapse the cat into one state or the other, but I am not clever enough to elucidate how that relates to Schroedinger - I assume from Schroedinger's view, Wigner's friend is still entangled with the cat, and therefore getting ready simultaneously to report the cats sad demise and it's joyous survival.

Examples of measurements without consciousness:
A photon hitting a photographic plate and causing a chemical reaction
Cosmic rays interacting with particles in space
Radioactive decay triggering a Geiger counter in an empty room
DNA mutations caused by radiation

Each collapses the wave function. None involve consciousness. — Banno

Or, presumably, in a box with a cat. So much for Schroedinger and his diabolical cat experiment - as in

in a small vial is a tiny amount of a radioactive substance, so little that within an hour one atom may decay—but equally likely, none will. If an atom decays, a Geiger counter detects it and triggers a relay that releases a hammer, which shatters a flask of hydrocyanic acid. If this system has been left to itself for an hour, one would say the cat is still alive if no atom has decayed. The first atom to decay would have poisoned the cat. The wave function of the entire system would express this by showing the living and dead cat as coexisting in a mixed state.

(Translation of Schrödinger’s original text. Source: Wikipedia) — Jan

The problem with your @Banno, claim above is that various experiments seem to have produced at least somewhat macro superpositions. I grant that it hasn't yet reached the scale of a geiger counter, let alone a cat, but it's a lot more than a single radioactive atom.

Still. I'd like to see your evidence if you are claiming what you seem to be claiming above as established fact, that would resolve the question of Schroedinger's cat into a matter of fact that we merely do not know until we open the box. I can't find any hint in your link, which seems to think it is not so resolved.

Classics is a diverse and multidisciplinary degree – you’ll be covering the languages, literatures, history, and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome. Graduates have a reputation for being intelligent, analytical, and articulate. ...[snip]...

What you could study

Latin language
Greek language
Greek drama: tragedy and comedy
The ancient novel
Metamorphosis
Iliad
Aeneid
Sculpture
Ancient Greek philosophy: the pre-Socratic to Aristotle, and beyond
Greek and Roman mythology

https://www.ucas.com/explore/subjects/classics

Just sayin'...

Wake up calls are alarmist!

The importance of living in the 'here and now' is one emphasised by many authors. — Jack Cummins

It is surely only an act* of imagination to suppose one is ever any-when-or-where else.

*act as in 'performance'.

Here and now is where/when we dream of a future as a replay of the past - only better, with hindsight.

*Every performance is live; even the replay of a recording is live, only it is unresponsive to the audience

My favourite science reporter, here explains to me what the f is a 'time crystal' and opens some interesting prospects for future tech.

I suppose the question then is, given this realization, how do we make the dog obey? Is a fascist the equivalent of a feral dog which has no other solution but to put it out of its misery? — Moliere

They are not the dogs, we are, in their eyes. It is a symmetrical understanding of each that the other is the dog.

The reason for this is economic. During the 20th Century, wealth was produced by mass production and sustained by mass consumption. This required a mass of 'wage slaves' that also functioned as consumers. But the advent of robots and 3d printing eliminates the need for mass production and consumption as everything can be made 'bespoke'. The masses are surplus to requirements, and are therefore being turned against each other. It becomes a dog eat dog world.

Neither ballot nor bullet will save us because we are the dogs of war fighting amongst ourselves. "Oh ye of little faith!"

The population will crash to the point where everyone becomes glad to see another human, of any kind, that is not a corpse. Love triumphs in the long run.

For me to understand violence is a means of understanding how to negotiate towards non-violence. — Moliere

That stops working when you are dealing with people who are violently opposed to violence.

You and I, you have to understand, are the violent extremist left wing conspiracy that is directly promoting and funding this wave of violence sweeping the country; there is no talking to us, we have to be stopped by any means necessary. When you talk about non-violence you sound exactly like Putin.

To put it another way, there is a loss of faith, and we can only negotiate in good faith. We cannot negotiate as or with the faithless; there is no basis for communication, let alone negotiation. One does not try and negotiate with a dog, one is satisfied with obedience.

This is quite long. There's a bit of detail and nuance. It mainly focusses on the UK, but lessons can be drawn for other places. (Trump trigger warning.)

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest at about the same time: 3 kids wounded including the shooter who died, in just another High School shooting. Nothing to talk about here, not newsworthy at all - none of them had 1m followers or a history of ranting, so none of us cares a damn.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/shooting-reported-colorado-high-school-2-kids-transported/story?id=125452526

It's.. just a song, man. Just because I paint a picture of a war or scene with people deceased doesn't mean I want to go out and kill somebody. — Outlander

I don't think you did, Bob. And nor would I.

Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. — Matthew 26:52

Typical Jesus hyperbole. But when it is exemplified for once it seems an appropriate lament.

But I prefer this sentiment, from the American Jesus, addressed to the Masters of the 2nd amendment:

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead — Bob Dylan, Masters of War

But the last word must surely go to the great admiral, Nelson.

This would suggest that "happening" references conscious perception of the thing as opposed to anything to do with the thing. — Hanover

Yes, time is a limitation of (our human) consciousness, whereas for God, "Before Abraham was, I am."

Or I sometimes like to say, "Being is, whereas Nothing happens." — Time implies 'not yet'.

But that doesn’t make suffering reducible to “just a judgment.” — Truth Seeker

No, I certainly didn't intend that reduction, especially the 'just'. Pain is real, and judgements are real, and suffering is real. The point I want to emphasise though is that the idea that suffering is not bad is contradictory, and thus that the reduction of suffering gives a necessary and real foundation of morality.

And compare this to my earlier suggestion, in relation to communication:

Consider the proposition, "Falsehood is better than truth."
If it were true, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
If it were false, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
'Therefore, 'truth is better than falsehood' is the only tenable moral position on truth. — unenlightened

To be alive as a human, is to make judgements of oneself and of the world, between edible and poisonous, true and false, friend and foe, and so on. And though one can be mistaken, one cannot actually prefer foes to friends, falsehood to truth, poison to food, or suffering to comfort.

Hey, that's some welcome good news. Except not for Americans who think vaccines are a conspiracy.

OK, this is rather interesting to any philosopher of science, but it is mainly a cautionary tale about the social nature of science and the importance of socio-political factors in the progress of science. It is anyway well worth your time to watch, and you might even learn something about plate tectonics and/or US Navy secrecy habits.

But that sprained ankle, not like a color (as such) at all. The very salient feature of its pain is the very essence of the category! This empirical science cannot deal with this, and analytic philosophy simply runs away, because to admit this is ,like admitting an actual absolute. Like admitting divine existence in their eyes.
But are they wrong? After all, this IS the essence of religion: an absolute in the metaethical analysis.
— Constance

That’s very well put. I think you’re right that suffering is not like the color red, which only becomes “red” in relation to our perceptual and linguistic frameworks. The sting of pain is not dependent on cultural categories - it is what it is in a way that forces itself upon us prior to analysis. — Truth Seeker

@Constance @Truth Seeker Pain is not the same as suffering. One might say that pain is the alarm system of the body's damage control function. Sometimes the alarm can go off because there is a fault in the system.

Suffering is a response; an attitude one takes to pain or to other experience; a judgement. One can suffer from guilt, from ennui, from despair, as well as from pain.

So the essence of suffering is the negative judgement of the sufferer. Thus the endurance athlete has to learn to withhold that negative judgement and thus overcome the 'pain barrier' that would otherwise limit their performance.

But this means that suffering is totally in the experience of the sufferer, and it makes no sense to say, therefore, that suffering is good, because suffering is constituted by the judgement that it is bad.

I can still say, though, that your suffering is good for me, if I find it amusing or consoling, or gratifying in some way, but it is not the suffering that you feel, but the idea thatI have (of you suffering) that I am gratified by.

3) Talk therapy for managing pain.
Psychotherapy includes different methods to help you understand and change unhealthy feelings. It also helps you to understand unhealthy thoughts and actions. It can help you manage or change how you feel the pain.

https://nursesgroup.co.uk/pain-management-in-nursing

It stops everything happening at once.

Imagine a movie, but every frame projected simultaneously ... the divine white light of god-consciousness. Even the darkest soul, from the view of eternity, is nothing but a flash of white light.

The 'physical brain' as an object is only disclosed to us through our awareness or consciousness of it, And in order to begin to understand it through neuroscience, we inevitiably rely on the mental operations fundamental to rational inference, We can't put them to one side or step outside them to see what the brain might be apart from those connected concepts and hyopotheses. In that context, rational inference is epistemologically[/i[ basic to anything we surmise about the brain, — Wayfarer

I can understand your intentionality from the outside as a physical process, as long asI do not try to understand my own. But when I intend to understand my own intentionality, I enter an infinite fractal labyrinth. The feedback of intending to understand the intention to understand produces a scream or a howl of terror, or a maze with no exit.

Unless one can understand without any intention.

I think you're reading too much into it lol. — flannel jesus

I wouldn't be doing that if I hadn't existed - so think yourself lucky. :wink: