Girogio Agamben - What Is Philosophy (Reread)
Michael James Bennett - Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics: The Image of Nature
Jean Piaget - Structuralism

It's not a big deal just institute a ~80% tax on the wealthiest like they did in America for 30+ years and no worries. Make America Great Again.

Anyone with a serious investment in theology ought to find this thread even more embarrasing than I, given that it reads like the kind of garbage teenagers stoned in a basement would ask each other a few joints down.

I don't think I will.

No, I'm saying that this thread - in which Jainism is nowhere discussed by anyone save a brief, auxiliary mention in the the OP - is not worthy of any forum.

Because it is a poor quality thread that ought to have been deleted had there not already been replies to it.

He's such a fuckin' embarrassment of a human being.

Lol, you think this about Trump? The US has been in terminal decline since the late 70s at the latest.

Trump, who has funnelled billions of public money into private hands pretending like he gives a shit about disparity and propagandist fucks like NOS being a nice little brown nosed bitch about it.

https://nypost.com/2020/07/27/sanders-co-chair-voting-for-biden-like-eating-half-a-bowl-of-s-t/

"It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of s–t in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still s–t’, ” Sanders co-chair Nina Turner told The Atlantic."

Yep.

The US is not a free, democratic country.

Biden's election will probably smooth the transition to the next Trump as his middling will inevitably disappoint everyone and, as conditions deteriorate further in the absence of any systemic change, cause the political ratchet to click one more to the right as it has done for the last 50 years of American politics.

Daily reminder that Trump is a failure and NOS is a sycophantic piece of shit.

a "form-of-life" is like a quasi-totalitarian set of informal rules that people become subject to in the "zone of indistinction" between public and private, bios and zoe, life. — thewonder

I think you've misunderstood somewhat. What Agamben sees in the Franciscan order is a failed attempt to articulate a form-of-life. 'Properly' articulated - that is, articulated with a 'positive' conception of 'use' that is lacking for the Franciscans - a form-of-life is not at all bound up with a 'quasi-totalitarian set of informal rules'. Indeed the failure of the Franciscans followed from their attempt to think in terms of 'rules' instead of uses, even if that attempt did allow them to think and live in a very radical way, which Agamben really admires. Moreover, the separation between bios and zoe does not 'politicize' life: a form-of-life is not 'apolitcal', it too, is a political: "form-of-life is a being of potential... this constitutes form-of-life immediately as political life" (Agamben, The Use of Bodies, p.208). So what's at stake is the kind of politicization at work in the separation of bios and zoe, not the sheer 'fact' of it 'politicizing' life.

If you can, check out the third part of Agamben's Use of Bodies, where he goes much further in articulating what is a 'form-of-life' than he does in The Highest Poverty.

It's hilarious how fuckwit like NOS thinks Trump is playing some kind of 11D chess when it's clear that Trump just bleets out whatever he shits out of his brain at whatever moment in time. Exactly how stupid does one have to be to buy into the post-hoc rationalization of a compete fucking idiot like Trump? NOS stupid, I guess. No surprise given that Trump's presidency is reliant upon a citizenry of brain-dead morons.

It even works on cats. — Banno

You clearly don't know the cats I know.

Well Hermain Cain died of coronavirus after most likely contracting it at Trump's Tulsa rally — Maw

Excellent news. One of the founders of Turning Point carked it too. Can't wait till more of these fucks drop dead.

Probs worth setting out why 'pointing' is so monumentally stupid to anyone who as yet doesn't get it: pointing is woefully inadequate insofar as ostention is radically indeterminate: if one points at a picture of a flower, one could be pointing at it's shape, a certain contour, a certain color, the fact of it's being a picture, a certain arrangement of shapes, the flower qua example of something else, the flower being the first in a series, literally anything. Pointing is utterly incapable of individuating anything on it's own, and doesn't so much explain anything whatsoever other than to demand further explanation. Pointing is the theology of meaning, a shitty stop-gap like saying 'God' and expecting that to satisfy anyone with even half a brain.

Ugh just read the opening sections of the PI and everyone can go home. Pointing. Pft. 2020 and people still think words are pointing. Must be all the cuts to the education budget.

Some great Socratic instruction going on here @Banno.

The other criteria would be being able to read what is written I guess.

Ah yes, the very popular opinion that reading Kant is a cakewalk.

And how do you distinguish the wheat from the chaff? Do you have some objective process for this or do you rely on popular opinion? — A Seagull

One criteria is anyone who thinks Kant is hard to read.

To sort out the wheat from the chaff and then watch the chaff complain about it.

Exactly who posits the multiverse as a solution to the question of consciousness? Name names.

On why the "overpopulation problem" is classist, racist garbage:

Achille Mbembe - On the Postcolony
Achille Mbembe - Critique of Black Reason
Achille Mbembe - Necropolitics

@Baden @fdrake

It's not something I can do, but I've notified a couple of users who can. What would you like you username changed to?

Tagging for notification.

Works fine! Welcome to the forum.

I have moved your thread to the lounge, in case you're wondering where it is.

Bernard Cache - Earth Moves: the Furnishing of Territories

You have to simply look at how you see causes being responsible for certain effects. There is an art (and pragmatism) of understanding causality and there is no metaphysical reason to see that as mere 'folk' understanding of causation. — csalisbury

Yeah exactly - 'look and see' being the empirical principle par excellence. I think it also makes more sense when it comes to the phenomenology of scientific - or other - investigation: we pay attention to what the system under investigation 'pays attention' to, where, even if we delineate what constitutes a 'system', we still need to follow it's lead. I'm very fond on these lines from Susan Oyama, whom always comes to mind when I deal with this stuff:

"For coherent integration to be accomplished, an investigator must do by will and wit what the [system] does by emerging nature: sort out levels and functions and keep sources, interactive effects, and processes straight. ... This is not to say that selection of variables must be random or that analysis is impossible. It is to suggest that guidance is more likely to come from the system under investigation than from some more abstract assumption ... Fine investigators have always been guided by good intuitions about what their phenomenon is "paying attention" to ... Scientific talent is partially a knack for reading one's particular system productively."

[And because it's on my mind - the kind of thing accords to what D&G call 'minor science', which is always a matter of "following the singularities of a matter", which they distinguish from "reproducing", which "implies the permanence of a fixed point of view that is external to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank".]

Looks right to me.

https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN24A268

Not Trump related per se, but Gorsuch has been a very interesting justice so far...

The sleight of hand that makes determinism seem to be a system property seems to be the specification of an initial condition with sufficient precision; as if the specification of an initial condition was done externally to the dynamics of any actual Galton box. — fdrake

Yes, exactly! I was thinking about this in relation to the little Galton board video you posted - funnily enough, the balls don't fall exactly into the 'normal' distribution - some lines are a little over, some are a little under. And it got me thinking - does this mean that this Galton board is a badly designed one? Well no - if the board were designed such that you really did get a perfect distribution, then then it's precisely the tweaking of inputs which guarantees consistency of output. In truth, the normal distribution is a totally ideal property: it's what the sum of infinite runs of the board would converge to, at the limit (ergodic property?).

So you're right: the 'search' for initial conditions ("if we just knew the initial conditions with enough precision...") can be nothing other than a fixing of initial conditions in order to make determinism a system property. I'm reminded here of Kant's 'intellectual intuition': that wherein knowledge and being coincide, available only to a God, who needs no mediation of the sensible (time and space). Or else Wittgenstein's meter rule: that which neither is nor is not a meter. The 'fixed' Galton board would be like that: neither a Galton board not not one.... it would be like, a gif of a Galton board, a moving image.

That sits uneasy with the hypothetical claim that we could if only it were specified to sufficient precision; that "if only" means we're no longer talking about the above box. — fdrake

:up:

Some additional thoughts:

For me, the most important take-away is the fact that for Anscombe, determination is 'possibility-relative': "We see that to give content to the idea of something’s being determined, we have to have a set of possibilities, which something narrows down to one – before the event".

But the question is: whence this set of possibilities, and not another set? With the Galton board, it seems 'natural' to pick out the relevant set of possibilities as distribution of balls among the pipes, but it's important to recognize just how arbitrary this is. It's certainly not a given of nature, for instance, that these possibilities must be thought together to the exclusion of all other possibilities (that the sky is blue at the time of the experiment, for instance). And if that is so, this means that 'determinability' (and with it, indeterminability) is itself not a 'natural' category - we cannot ask of nature, taken as a whole: 'is it determined or not?'.

Or, to introduce another distinction (whose applicability in these situations was brought to my attention by @fdrake): we cannot ask the question of determinability at a global level, only at a local one. And what 'picks out' or individuates a local situation ('set of possibilities') is, or must be, a question of motivation. Part of the problem with using a Galton board to think about this stuff is precisely because it is so arbitrary: the distribution of balls does not correspond to any particular effect which follows from that distribution - it does not couple to any system for which the distribution makes a difference.

...but one ball or a thousand, the result is still a normal distribution. — Banno

Certainly not one ball (you can't have a distribution of one ball).

So despite causality being after the event we can predict the outcome. Is there a contradiction here? — Banno

I don't think so - what motivates this question? And note that the question of prediction is almost entirely absent from the Anscombe paper. She mentions it twice, and both times they are ancillary to her main points. And there's the matter of being clear about what 'the outcome' refers to: surely you mean - 'the outcome' of a normal distribution of balls. But if determination is - as Anscombe argues - externally related to causality - it's not clear why one would think that a contradiction results from the predictability of outcome and the post-hoc nature of causality.

This thread does not meet the quality standards of the forum.

Reading notes: So it seems like there's a few things going on in the Anscombe essay. Here are some that stood out:

(1) Disentanglement of causality from necessity. Positive claim: there can be causes which do not follow of necessity.

(2) Disentanglement of determination from causality. Positive claim: Something can be determined without being caused. It strikes me that Anscombe is ultimately unconcerned with causality. It all but drops out of consideration in the second half of the paper. It was used as a 'way in' to talk about 'determination' and its obverse, 'indetermination'.

(2.1) 'Determination' cannot be thought outside of some given range of possibilities: "to give content to the idea of something’s being determined, we have to have a set of possibilities, which something narrows down to one – before the event". By distinction, causality is post-hoc: "But there is at any rate one important difference – a thing hasn’t been caused until it has happened".

(3) Conclusion: 'Indeterminism' must be admitted, at the very least, as a possibility. Interderminism meaning: given a set of outcomes, it cannot be specified, in advance, which will obtain.

(4) I have a huge question about the level of granularity - mereological and temporal - at which all these considerations are meant to apply. Are these conclusions meant to be the same for the Galton board, taken as a whole, and a single ball travelling along a Glaton board path? Why is each of these two cases individuated as such? What motivates this individuation? Why not consider some balls, and not others? Maybe two balls, rather than one; or why not the Galton board, and the path of one or two or three or all balls? How does taking into account these analytic 'cuts' - seemingly arbitrary, affect the analysis?

The question of 'givenness' ("given a range of possibilites...") has big implications on the status of in/determinism (epistemological? ontological? Something other?). Anscombe is ambigious about this, but intuits it when she discusses the temporality of determination (determined when?) and distinguishes - without coming back to it - between determination and what she at one point calls 'predetermination'. Want to say more about this later. Will just open the question for now, if anyone else can see the issue.

[Noys is now banned, in case anyone was considering replying to him. Zero tolerance for racism on these boards].