Shouldn't it be the government that decides what to censor or is it up to private organizations? — FreeEmotion

The US Constitution restricts The State (or the states) from interfering with free speech. Private organizations (like churches, corporations, universities) are not so limited. That's why speech codes are more common on private campuses than public ones, or why Congress can not make Donald Trump shut the fuck up.

There is no such thing as free speech at work. If the boss wants to forbid his employees from discussing unions at work, he can.

Mass delusions of the political kind are quite common. We socialists in American engage in delusional thinking just about every day. In this we share delusional thinking with people who think that through hard work and inspiration they will become rich, maybe as rich as Elon Musk or Bill Gates. Or that they have a good chance of winning the lottery. There is the delusion that Democrats will deliver heaven and the Republicans will deliver hell (or visa versa). There's the delusion, shared by millions, that vaccinations are part of a conspiracy of Satanic proportions (a la QAnon), ad nauseam.

Trump is perhaps delusional, or perhaps he is fiendishly clever. I tend to think it's the former because fiendish cleverness requires a lot of cognitive horse power, which we have not seen much evidence of in Trump. He isn't stupid (presumably) but he's no stable genius either.

Part of Donald Trumps very large problem is that he spurned proper etiquette. Other presidents may have been delusional, but they minded their 'Ps and Qs'. (Nixon was a crook, but his corrupt practices were outsourced and performed at night, the way skullduggery is supposed to be done.) They played their part properly. Trump did not -- and it would appear that he had not paid enough attention to know what "proper" was for an elected high public official. Manipulating the masses is, of course, de rigueur, and he knew how to do that but it's supposed to be subtle -- not a travesty.

His biggest delusion was his sense of entitlement to the presidency. I suppose he thought of it as a lifetime job. A lot of problems have been caused by people thinking they were in for life.

Worse than Trump alone are the groups like the Proud Boys, QAnon, and millions of demented Republicans who have a symbiotic relationship with Trump. Even if we lynched Donald tomorrow, his followers would remain at large and in a position to cause more, maybe much more, trouble.

Before 1/20/21, chances of impeachment are slim--just because such a proceeding is too time-consuming. I doubt if the House & Senate could get themselves organized to perform a summary impeachment. As for felony convictions, there's tax evasion and fraud, a New York State criminal case from which the shit stain cannot pardon himself should he be found guilty.

Trump will remain a dangerous person after 1/20; he should be put in a strait jacket and transferred from the White House to a high security psychiatric facility for treatment of extreme delusional thinking. Perhaps something along the lines of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. They can take his running dog lackeys with him.

"humanely farmed animals" suffer cruelty and abuse — Down The Rabbit Hole

Your argument resembles those of antinatalists: "being born means forced suffering". No matter how you start, you end up with livestock suffering. There's no nuance in your argument.

Animals suffer--period. Wild or farmed, cow or human being, there is no escaping suffering. Abuse can be avoided but suffering can not.

There are solid arguments for vegetarian diets--the strongest one is the ecological argument. Farming animals produces more CO2 than farming crops only. You'd be on solid ground with that approach.

(within limits) suffering is compatible with a good life--for any animal, human or other. Suffering isn't compatible with some rose-tinted "perfect life", which is OK, because there is no such thing as a "perfect life" for any creature, anywhere.

it does appear that these animals possess sufficient instinct and awareness to find all of this very unpleasant — Mijin

I think what you said is true. Their capacity to suffer is why farming should be humane. Foie gras is an egregious example of cruelty. Also egregious is boxing in pigs. The methods used in high-volume chicken raising operations (as well as turkey) are appalling. And so on.

Corporate farming, which maximizes the intensity of resource utilization and output (space, feed, meat, eggs, milk) is the problem. We do not have to go back to the pre-WWII (or maybe pre-WWI) model of very small family farms of 160-200 acres, 100 pigs, a flock of very free-range birds, and 30 to 40 cows. Then pigs had optional access to outdoors, even in cold winter months. Ditto for chickens. Geese live outside all winter. There's not much for a cow to do outside when the ground is frozen, but they were let out while the barn was cleaned. Doing that would require at least 20% of the population to take up agriculture. That is not going to happen.

I would like to see the size of individual hog, fowl, beef, and dairy operations scaled back to a large extent. This would require more labor, more barns, more barnyards, and more pasture land. The total amount of feed would not change very much. Yes, the cost would rise, but the end product would be healthier and more humane.

Beef raised on pasture (In the summer) and hay (in the winter) without grain generally have fewer infections and harbor far fewer pathogenic bacteria. It takes longer to reach full weight, though. that's OK.

Mega-animal operations are unhealthy for humans and animals. A hog, for instance, produces about as much fecal matter per day as an adult human does. Very, very few hog farms dispose of hog manure in a safe manner. Imagine 100,000 people living in a small county with no sanitary sewers.

— Stanley Fish — Wayfarer

Is this the same Fish that Camille Paglia characterized as a "totalitarian tinkerbell"?

'religious people as opposed to secular people' already injects an air of adversity into the discussion. — Wayfarer

It seems like secularists and religionists have opposed each other for quite some time.

I am unanimously in opposition to theocracies of any kind. I'm equally against religious viewpoints getting their hog's snout into the secular statehouse. Wishy-washy religion (like mainstream-protestantism) is less harm-prone than turbo-catholicism, the fecal-fundamentalism of either Christianity or Islam, not to pardon the religions not mentioned.

Secular governments are not supposed to engage with religion, either to advance or repress it. But the overheated extreme is a risk to secularism, even if there is no risk of theocracy. NGOs, however, are not excluded from engaging with religion. I'd like to see more and vigorous advocacy of secularism to counter the hog snout trying to get the whole pig into statehouses.

Of course for both there is a continuum of views, individual by individual. And secularity vs. religiosity have contended with each other for far longer than identity politics have been in play. Like, French Revolution?

As noted above, "secularism" and "religious" are vague terms. "religious" can cover everything from people who are vaguely and slightly spiritual to the rigidly devout who pray, attend religious services daily, and read scripture. "Secular" runs the same gamut on the other side.

Actually, though, a lot of secular people are religious and a lot of religious people are secular. Conundrum? Contradiction in terms? Nonsense? No, because in (most) western societies secularism is the dominant principle of society which, by design, leaves room for religious practice--as long as it doesn't impinge on secularism. So, in France the largely secular society keeps religious out of state affairs (no crucifixes or hijabs in school, for instance). In the US, where religious participation is higher than in most states, the borders between religion and state are policed by both sides.

How can religious people be secular? They don't expect the state to fulfill specific religious objectives, such as evangelizing the population or restricting activities they consider sinful (like drinking, gambling, non-marital and gay sex, etc.). What religious people can do, and sometimes do quite vigorously, is pressure the state to perform social programs that benefit the whole.

That said, there are exceptions; the biggest one is the struggle to allow, or deny, abortions which on one side is a secular principle, and on the other side a decidedly spiritual one. Gay rights, even gay tolerance, is another secular-religious fight.

For what it's worth, the older term, "natural philosophy", became "science" in the 19th century (or maybe later in the 18th century, depending). Gradually the the older term (natural philosophy) disappeared and was replaced by the newer term "science" that developed its own methodology and techniques.

Is "science" still part of philosophy? Some say yes, some say no,

At the moment of brain death our consciousness exits stage left and is never again seem on the stage. That's why death is a tragic event: there's nothing after death. Which is why many people heartily believe in a happy heaven afterlife. If you want to make death much worse, you can teach children that there is a ghastly hell, and they will probably spend eternity there because their behavior and thoughts are BAD.

For me, the finality of death adds to the goodness of life. Time goes by so fast when you are alive.

Remember: It's is a once-around world, a once around life. And when you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer. In Heaven there is no beer, which is why we drink it here.

The following are the philosophical views of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Factory farming is not not inherently cruel and abusive; cruelty and abuse could take place just as easily on a little farm as a very big one. Cruelty and abuse occur in human workplaces and shelters, too.

Animal advocates go off the deep end they equate artificial insemination with rape. I've observed cows being inseminated artificially and it isn't a painful process.

Pork, salmon, tilapia, chickens, turkeys, beef, are all intensively raised. Truly free-range chicken, lamb, beef, pork, or turkey is very hard to come by, and yes, it is much more expensive because there is no economy of scale in raising a couple hundred field-run turkeys or chickens. (fowl are usually raised in batches of thousands)

There is no escape from the costs of feeding billions of people. There are human and environmental costs associated with ALL agriculture, whether the end product fills the bellies of vegans, vegetarians, or carnivores.

Yes. It's ethical to eat beef raised on a grain diet in a feed lot farm. The quality of the beef won't be the same as when it is raised on pastureland and hay (over the winter months). Free range beef can cost $8-$10 a pound.

Well, that was easy enough. You might join TheMadFool in his investigations of nothing. — jgill

He might want to watch vintage Seinfeld episodes about producing a TV show about nothing. One of my favorites.

My original point was just to say, these rates of change are miles away from life before the 1800s and especially before the 1400s. To compare the cultural change in the roman empire with the modern US is all kinds of silly. The Roman empire didn't change as much in all of its life as the US did in just 60 years and that's true of 1900 to 1960 or 1960 to 2020. — Judaka

Very true. The "collapse of the Roman Empire" was a slow-motion event requiring centuries to be complete. The centuries after its demise were times of more slow-motion change (for the most part). The 1066 Norman Invasion of English was an exceptionally high speed event.

Let's make a comparison of 1900 with 1960. In 1900 new technology had changed the way people lived and interacted. Production and distribution of electricity was about to become a common-place thing. Big change. The telephone was changing the way people communicated, as did the telegraph (introduced about 60 years earlier, 1840). Photography was becoming much easier. Radio was becoming a thing (not broadcasts yet, just point to point). Airplanes and automobiles were coming over the horizon. These were all BIG changes.

Take the auto. A car allowed one to move around more easily compared to bicycle, a horse, or on foot. More to the point, a car eventually offered mobile privacy. People could quickly escape the immediate vicinity of family, friends, and onlookers. (Granted, this didn't happen until cars became common and reliable.) This was a huge change with far reaching consequences.

A person living in the first decade of 1900, transported to 1960, would probably find life less comprehensible that a 1960s transplant to 2020. But your point stands.

But so does the idea that in reverse, a 1960s transplant to 1900, or a 2020 transplant to 1960 would NOT find life incomprehensible. When you read material from 1900, 120 years later, it makes perfect sense. Sure, characters in a story might navigate a dark house by candle light instead of electric light, but... one can understand that.

I'll grant you that language changes, sometimes significantly. I find 18th century prose more accessible than a lot of the more recent Victorian prose. Style of expression does change. Granted.

As you said, we'll have to agree to disagree, but I think you have supported your view, and I think I have too. The leaves on a tree change every fall, but it's the same tree with new leaves in the spring. Languages add and subtract, but they stay the same language, at least over the short run of a few centuries. You can understand Shakespeare. You have no difficulty understand 400 year old language when Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, part 2, says "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Right?

On the one hand, we will have to agree to disagree. On the other hand, you did a fine job of supporting your position in this post. I looked at the seven links you provided and found them compellingly informative. (Some of the information was familiar to me, some not.).

Uncle Karl (Marx) said that the conditions of culture depend on/are caused by the nature of material production. What and how stuff is produced, in other words. We can over-generalize this truism, but it seems like the critical change in production during and following the 1960s was miniaturization of electronic parts -- tubes to transistors, individual transistors to printed circuits, and ever-smaller but more powerful printed circuits. Programmable computers existed in 1960, and they weighed a ton. in 1980 they weighed a few pounds. Today the computing power in a cell phone so far exceeds that of a 1960 computer that a comparison is difficult to make. Most of the components in a cell phone existed in a [much) larger-form.

I was involved in educational technology in the late 1960s and 1970s. What we were trying to do with media [remote supply of educational material] didn't begin to become feasible until the 'personal computer' of the 1980s, and the World Wide Web became casually usable around 20 years ago. The key was miniaturization of components, and the resulting increasing in power.

A lot of what you are talking about is the result of miniaturization squared of electronic components.

Other changes of which you speak are the result of changes in wealth flows which got under way at the end of the post-WWII boom, starting in 1973. Domestic production (and jobs) began to decline; working class wages both stagnated and declined. Changes in tax laws benefitted a minority of high-end earners at the expense of low-end earners. Et cetera.

These material changes made it impossible for most people to continue the single-earner nuclear family model, resulting in a lot more social change (and perhaps decay).

So I'll grant you a major win here: things have changed a lot since 1960.

See my next post.

The archetypal experience of culture in the 1960s is very different than in 2020, few things have remained the same. — Judaka

Your position on 1960 vs. 2020 is just plain wrong, because:

You are missing the fact of cultural continuity.

The 'current' economy driving western civilization (be that French, Australian, or Finn) has been in force for at least the last 150 years--and longer. products change, corporate names are refreshed, companies merge, new factories are built for new technologies (transistors instead of tubes, then integrated circuits etched onto silicon, then...), management changes, consumer preferences change. Land barges with fins, then without fins; smaller cars vs. big cars; back to big cars; gas powered cars to electric cars.

Saks 5th Avenue was founded in 1860. It's still in business, but it is owned by the Hudsons Bay Company, which was founded in 1670. My favorite beer is Stella Artois, a Belgian pilsener; the brewery was founded in 1366. There are quite a few companies that have been in business for hundreds of years.

The language has not changed. New formal words and new slang has been added; other words have been dropped. Grammar remains the same. Pronunciation of words (accents) are by their nature always changing, but the meaning--however the word is spoken--changes very slowly, 999 times out of 1000. One might take a walk around the block; in 1960 the word was pronounced the way it is spelled. In some areas (like Detroit) the pronunciation is changing to something closer to 'bleck'.

While specieshood poses limits on what we can do (literally), social styles and moral norms change fairly rapidly, but not drastically. You might be less likely to be hanged for murder in 2020 than in 1960, but murder is about as frowned on now as then. Ditto for a lot of other crimes. The use of recreational drugs waxes and wanes over time, and for the most part you could get as high in 1960 as in 2020. Birth control which became widely available in the 1960s changed the sexual equation (to some extent), and that change is still in effect.

Life has changed more for women than heterosexual men; that is a significant change. Life for gay men has changed a great deal. Sex, however, has not changed; there are no new ways. What works in 2020 will work in 1960.

Changes come and go. Some people had groceries delivered to their homes in 1960. Later that became much less common; then it became more common again. Amazon may seem revolutionary, but in 1960 there were mail order catalogues from Sears, Wards, Spiegel. et al, selling a huge array of goods. At one time Sears even sold pre-fabricated houses; not mini-houses, full sized ones.

Maybe you spend too much time among your own age group. Get out more.

If you like to read, try something from the late 18th century--Boswell, for example. He was a lawyer, man about town, friend of Samuel Johnson. Better yet, try Samuel Pepys, 1633 1703. He was another man on the make, man about town. He kept a diary (in cypher) which now makes great reading. His daily comings and goings 300 years ago aren't all that much different than what a similar socially/sexually active guy might be doing now.

Here's a joke from 1960. It's a long, formulaic joke, but I am confident you will be able to understand all the words in it, and might even get the joke; you might even smile slightly.

A fisherman’s joke

The day after his wife disappeared in a kayaking accident, a Claddaghduff, an Irish man answered his door to find a grim-faced Constable & one waiting in the front yard. "We're sorry, Mr. O’ Flynn, but we have some information about your dear wife, Maureen" said one of the officers.

"Tell me! Did you find her?" Michael Patrick O’Flynn asked. The constables looked at each other and one said, "We have some bad news, some good news, and some really great news. Which would you like to hear first?

"Fearing the worst, Mr. O’ Flynn said, "Give me the bad news first." The constable said, "I'm sorry to tell you, sir, but early this morning we found your poor wife's body in the bay." "Lord sufferin' Jesus and Holy Mother of God!" exclaimed O’ Flynn. Swallowing hard, he asked,

"What could possibly be the good news?" The constable continued, "When we pulled the late, departed poor Maureen up, she had 12 of the best-looking Atlantic lobsters that you have ever seen clinging to her. Haven't seen lobsters like that since the 1960's, and we feel you are entitled to a share in the catch."

Stunned, Mr. O’ Flynn demanded, "Glory be to God, if that's the good news, then what's the really great news?

The constable replied, "We're gonna pull her up again tomorrow."

Cultural / Societal / Civilizational collapse could be defined as:

the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. — ssu

This definition fits the 'fall of the Roman Empire' fairly well. In 476 Odoacer rang down the curtain on the Roman Empire (according to many historians). It may have been this German fellow who sent the regalia of Roman office to Constantinople, recognizing that the western Roman government was defunct.

'Roman identity' didn't evaporate over night, of course; but it did begin to become less specific. The city of Rome was physically deteriorating, and if I remember, Ravenna, NE of Rome, was the occasion of government. The western provinces were undergoing their own transitions. The center did not hold, but the empire didn't descend into darkness--the dark ages.

In Britain, the Roman establishment left fairly quickly, and the empty property was abandoned. The native locals, by and large, did not move in and redecorate. For one thing, they were preoccupied by another aspect of the decline of the empire -- population movement. Two German groups moved to Britain (the Angles and Saxons) which accelerated the demise of the Gaelic culture. The Gaelic people (in England, anyway) weren't wiped out--they were gradually submerged into the AS / Viking population.

Holy Mother Church, operating out of Rome in Western Europe, mounted and sustained a long effort to convert pagans to Christianity which was more or less successful. The collapse of Roman government and military, the movement of people, and the infusion of a vigorous new religion are all part of the collapse of western empire and the rise of Western Civilization. Languages changed too. Latin was localized, becoming Italian, French, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, et al. Many of the former local languages (Gaulish, Frankish, etc.) ceased and desisted.

Other civilizations--in the Western Hemisphere, for instance--suffered a fast collapse after the Spanish/Portuguese/English conquests. Different than the Roman collapse, but collapsed, never the less.

Western European Civilization appears to be neither declining nor decaying. In some ways it has become the global civilization (industrialism, capitalism, centralized. managerial states, media, trade, et cetera). Has it peaked? Too early to tell. Will it now decline if it has peaked? IF it has peaked, then it has to either plateau or decline, because that's what the word "PEAK" requires.

What is cultural collapse? — Judaka

That is the question, isn't it.

We probably can't see it except through a long-range rear-view mirror.

Is our culture decaying? — ssu

Maybe, but how would we know? Is there some reliable measure of cultural health analogous to individual physical health--blood pressure, white blood cell count, the ratio between high density lipids (good) and low density lipids (bad), weight, etc.? In what year did "our culture" begin? What is "cultural decay"? Is decay different than change? Yada, yada, yada.

I suspect that a lot of people thought their culture was decaying even as it was gathering steam, ever since a novel method of knapping rocks into tools was introduced on March 5th, 70,258 BCE.

Go back or forward sixty years and there'll be no familiarity, you'll feel like a stranger in your own country. — Judaka

@Judaka, who is 20 something, thinks a changing culture becomes indecipherable over a 60 year span; maybe in less time than that.

My father died at 102 in 2007. He grew up farming with horses. He had fond memories of air shows where a plane was brought into town on a rail car and assembled. The pilot flew around, did some tricks, and then the plane was taken apart and moved to another small town. (The range of the planes was short.) A few years later (1927) Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris, non stop. During his life radio, television, computers, jet passenger planes, men landing on the moon, distant planet fly-bys, organ transplants, and so on and so forth became commonplace.

Q: How did people communicate in 1960 without cell phones?
A: When they were away from home they could use pay phones, which back then were everywhere. 5¢ or 10¢ was all that it took to make a local call. Phone booths usually had a very thick white-page and a yellow-page phone directory, listing just about everybody in the city. If there was no phone book, directory assistance was free. The sound quality of the calls were almost always at least very good, but there were no apps. If you wanted to take pictures, you used a camera with a role of film in it. If you wanted to know how to get to some location, you looked at a printed map. If you wanted to know what was happening, you bought a newspaper.

Judaka: borrow a book from the library, or buy one to read on your phone--something like The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren, published in1949. There is some slang you might not get, but I am confident that you will be able to understand 1949 English, and that the low-lifes depicted in 1949 Chicago will be comprehendible. Or try Incident At Owl Creek Bridge, a short story by Ambrose Bierce published in 1890. It's a great story and again I predict that you will be able to understand 1890 English.

Read more history. You might be surprised to discover that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln both put their pants on one leg at a time. Life in ancient Egypt MIGHT be incomprehensible, but you'd be able to understand what people were doing in Boston in 1776.

But H/Gs practiced limited agriculture too, and so do everyday modern people in their gardens — darthbarracuda

H/Ging goes back maybe 200,000 years. What evidence have you heard of that they were gardening (or some sort of limited agriculture) that far back? And how do you define 'limited agriculture'?

H/G had to be very good observers of plant and animal life in order to successfully hunt and forage. They probably knew a thing or two about how plants and animals reproduce, and maybe they planted a nut every now and then. But so do squirrels, and we don't think of them as farmers.

Agriculture is by definition sedentary; how do you square the necessary travel of hunter gatherers with a settled lifestyle? Like H/Ging, agriculture demands skill and tools. l don't have any special knowledge about this; I just don't see H/G and agriculture very compatible.

The question of good faith lending, admissions, and awarding degrees is complex.

High school advisors should themselves be aware, and help students be aware that universities look out for their own interests first. Admission, even awarding scholarships, doesn't mean that a useful or remunerative degree and satisfying career is in the offing. Universities require solid enrollment figures for income first, and as a general justification or their raison d'être.

Education costs have been rising for a good 40 years, so it should not come as a surprise that degrees cost money.

Whether a degree was worth the money may not be obvious for several years (or more) after graduation. I have a bachelors degree in English and a graduate degree in educational psychology. The English degree had much less immediate job-getting value than the graduate degree, even though the BA was worth much more in terms of learning. In the longer run, the English major (and general education) was worth it many times over in personal value. (I graduated in 1968)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts what fields have expanding, stable, and declining job numbers. Honest advising should steer students who will need to earn their way in the world away from majors which lead to few jobs. As much as one might like dance, French poetry, or art there just aren't many jobs in those areas. If one is independently wealthy, majoring in underwater basket weaving (an old cliche from my student days) is as good a choice as any.

Credit and debt education must occur In high school. I think a lot of student borrows have a very poor understanding of just how difficult discharging a $30,000 loan can be, especially when they want to take on more debt for a car and a home. Never mind a $50,000 loan, or more.

College was affordable when I was a student (1960s) because the state subsidized education, making fees quite affordable even for students who were kind of poor. One could get a work-study job on campus which would go a long ways towards paying for fees, for instance. The states withdrew from higher education subsidy under increasing demands for tax reduction. The burden of cost was shifted from the collective to individual families.

Would that cabal be called "the aristocracy"? I think that is a bit too conspirational. Farming and cities emerging because of their utility (and necessity) is likely more closer to the truth. — ssu

Right. That's what I think, too. The theory floated in Against The Grain is interesting, but I don't see an aristocracy, an elite, or a state existing before there was the material basis to support that kind of expensive socio-political organization. It seems likely that people gradually drifted into settled agriculture because there were some advantages to that kind of lifestyle, compared to exclusive hunting and gathering.

Once there was a solid material foundation on which elites could build, they did. And in retrospect it my look like the elite seduced the people into farming. That idea is not only conspiratorial, how would the elite have known that there even was any potential, and how much, in farming?

The technology of production developed before any social consequences could exist.

Many of us 'old people' (past 70, at least) find that it is difficult to get rid of stuff--not just really good stuff, but junk too. It seems like anything that has been on the table or counter for more than a day has gained some sort of entitlement. So millions of us are fighting with accumulating paper that we don't desire, actually do not want, but can't get rid of.

That might look like "attachment" but it is really a problem of perspective.

Quite a few people became addicted quickly after their first encounter with alcohol, meth, cocaine, weed, heroin, or something else. They didn't so much desire these substances as their brains were so constituted to be a trap ready to close once the substance came along. Some people are biochemically prone to addiction. For some more complicated psychological reason, some people are prone to become overly attached to other people.

Granted, people can get addicted by patient effort; I liked the idea of smoking enough to keep at it until I was addicted. Stupid, but advertising and peer influence works. I haven't smoked for 25 years, but I still have the urge sometimes.

Then there is GREED--one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Some people desire more (gold; bitcoins; real estate; pounds or dollars or Euros or whatever measure o wealth is handy). Let's call greed an attachment to things of recognized value. That's a problem with real moral consequences which is (presumably) NOT a problem of brain chemistry (alcoholism), inability to decide what to throw out (old age), psychological dependency disorders or OCD, etc. People who collect bits of string and add it to their big ball are not sinning, even if they are greedy for more bits of string. They are just weird.

Many attachments are normal, desirable, necessary, and good, as long as they doesn't become a neurosis (like parents who are attached to the desire for a child to be a violin prodigy who isn't). We should be attached to our homeland, family, faith, alma mater (send a donation), local community, and so on--in reasonable proportion. People who are overly attached to the Green Bay Packers or Miami Dolphins are just tedious, not a moral problem.

Oh, and Merry Christmas.

We know now that hunter-gathering, swiddening, pastoralism and the like are comparatively easier and healthier lifestyles. — darthbarracuda

That's what I've read, too.

Agriculture requires a lot more intensive and extensive cooperative labor than hunting and gathering. The cycles of nature produced sufficient food for hunting and gathering. Both lifestyles require sharp intellectual skills, and the skills of finding appropriate foods in the wild must have prepared people to succeed at agriculture. They had to be skilled botanists to find food plants and avoid poisoning themselves.

The Western Hemisphere was settled around the time that agriculture arose. The Amerindian people identified several fairly unprepossessing plants like the primitive tomato, teosinte (maize), potato, and so on and developed them into strains which could sustain large populations. That was a bit tricky, because a lot of the food crops the Amerindians developed are in the nightshade family of plants which can be quite toxic (tobacco, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, pepper) because of the alkaloid solanine, which is toxic in high concentrations. This had to have taken quite a bit of time to accomplish (centuries, millennia). Primitive tomatoes were the size of currents. Seeing a corn cob in the teosinte grass was a tremendous leap of imagination. Further, crop growing diffused north and south where there were starkly different bands of climate.

I'm not sure when Amerindians developed the first urban / state societies; but smaller village settlements must have developed early on, since plant breeding wouldn't seem to go well with a highly mobile lifestyle.

Lure people into grain growing. Where did the state get the idea of agriculture from? — Brett

I collapsed my incomplete understanding of undigested ideas in a book I read part of a while ago. We lazy philosophers sometimes do that. Besides which, all that isn't my theory.

Clearly the State could not precede the idea of settling down and growing grain in place of the H/G way of life. People had to be settled in place before even the simplest state could form. There had to have been a period (measured in millennia) of transition where people gradually shifted from H/G to Ag. We had to learn how to do it; and besides grain ("man can not live by bread alone") we had to find the various vegetable crops to supply basic nutrition in a settled community no longer foraging over a large area.

Agriculture preceded cities, too. Jericho was established around 9,000 years ago. I think agriculture must have existed for a while in a less settled form.

I don't know much about Jericho 9500 years ago. Uruk dates back to a more recent 6,500 years ago give or take a little. Uruk was one of several city states that rose, controlled the surrounding territory, then subsided. It seems like Uruk would fit the idea of a State encouraging agriculture for purposes of taxation, but 6,500 years ago doesn't line up very well with the rise of crop growing.

Maybe the state of the first State was just a bunch of thugs who forced people to work harder and then walked off with the crop. Some people's children prefer the notion that people can't accomplish anything cooperatively without a gang of thieves rising in the ranks and taking over. We do seem to have a tendency to behave like that, but I wasn't there. Had I been, I would hope that I would have been one of the bitter and resentful peasants fanning the flames of discontent.

Against The Current — Bitter Crank

Against the Grain — darthbarracuda

Sorry about that. The frontal lobe proofreader app failed again. Against The Current is a lefty magazine I used to read. Against The Grain is the title I intended to write.

So to react to your original post, early agricultural states were not based on an anxiety about the future and risk-aversion. Complete dependence on agriculture increased the risk of starvation. There was no good reason for anyone working the fields to be doing that, apart from coercion by the state. — darthbarracuda

That might be the case. I wasn't there, but it seems quite possible that some sort of early cabal roped a bunch of dopes into farming.

Agriculture is a high risk activity for individuals, even if not for the larger population. If agriculture is sufficiently expansive, enough food will usually be produced (usually; not always). For the individual farmer, agriculture is a gamble. Too much and not enough rain, rain at the wrong time, air that is too hot, too cold, too dry, too windy, carries too many locusts, disease -- etc. can all ruin an individual farmer's crop and turn food into starvation.

Agriculture was probably harder work than hunting-gathering. Hunter-gatherers were generally fairly healthy and reasonably long-lived, so I have read. They were mobile. They could follow food. Agriculturalists were literally stuck in the ground.

Against The Current (book) suggests that agriculture was the invention of the earliest nascent state which saw in agriculture a way of extracting wealth from peons. Lure people into grain-growing and they would -- of necessity or force -- stay put and produce more food (wealth) than they themselves needed to live. The surplus could be traded by the elite for other stuff.

In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. [Wikipedia]

In social psychology, naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.[Wikipedia]

When it comes to social interactions, our sensory testimony can be especially unreliable, and we probably do not see social aspects of the world with clarity, validity, and reliability a good share of the time. There are numerous aspects of social interactions which are not readily observable; things like motivation, 300 different kinds of bias, conscious and not-conscious hopes and fears, and so forth. And that's true of ourselves observing ourselves. Sometimes it is not clear what our own motivation was (in say, quitting a good job) until quite some time later.

The hotness of water or the shape of a tree is more easily nailed down than what, exactly, is going on socially between people, or among a group of people. (Not always, of course; sometimes social interactions are as clear as boiling water.)

Since then Eustis does not allow men to see the world through his eyes, even in exchange for a lot of wine. — Olivier5

I'm not familiar with Eustis; but it's a good story (apropo). Thanks.

Yes, and indeed there are. It was a comment on this particular thread, and some of the gormless and jejune naive realism that's been on display here. — Wayfarer

Well, you're on your way to celebrate the holy day with family; Merry [or happy] Christmas.

But... "gormless" is a lovely word. I've only read it here.

adjective Chiefly British Informal.
lacking in vitality or intelligence; stupid, dull, or clumsy.

Mid 19th century, respelling of gaumless.

I have entertained the notion that the world as we experience may be, in truth, much different than we think it is. Perhaps we would be shocked to see it with sensory abilities we do not have. Perhaps the true perception of the world would show that it is phantasmagorical. [Something phantasmagoric features wild and shifting images, colorful patterns that are continually moving and changing. The Greek word phantasma, meaning "image," is the ancestor of phantasmagoric, a word you can use to describe anything so weird it doesn't seem real.]

The problem with that conclusion (for me, anyway) is that I still exist in the world I perceive and interact with. If the world is, in fact, quite unlike what we perceive, what difference can it make to me? If the solidity in the world I perceive is in truth fluid, well... it seems solid, and solid works.

Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, suggests what it would be like if the 'much different and true reality' should become perceptible:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

And if you don’t? — Olivier5

Then we have discussions like this one.

We reach a consensus. I have poor vision; what my senses tell me about the world as it is will not be the same as someone with excellent vision. We compare notes and we find that there is significant overlap. I rarely see brightly colored birds; they all appear pretty much dark gray or black to me, unless they were eating at a feeder near a window. I've seen pictures, and people very enthusiastically report seeing such and such bird with brightly colored feathers. I've seen many pigeons, crows, starlings, chickens, wild ducks, and geese--and what I see of them fits with what people say about bluejays, cardinals, bluebirds, redwing blackbirds, goldfinches, and so on. We reach a consensus.

We have to learn to see the world as it is. Rock layers don't tell a story until one learns something about rocks--sediment, metamorphosis, uplift, folding, erosion, and so on. Same with all the different parts of the world as it is.

I conclude that nobody can see the world as it is. — Daemon

The-world-as-it-is can only be a human concept, in the end based on experience. The-world-as-it-is might not be accessible if we had no reliable, repeatable, valid sensory experience of the world. Because we have reliable, repeatable, valid sensory experience of the world, we can say we see the world as it is. Were sensory experience highly variable (such that some people perceived water as dry, fire as cool, thunder as a sucking sensation, and so on), we couldn't say the world is as we see it.

Just as a finite number of letters could conceivably be used to create an infinite number of sentences — NOS4A2

Are we sure about that? It seems like a finite set of letters could only produce a finite set of rearrangements (words, sentences). The number might be astronomically large, but still finite.

My understanding is quite finite, so...

My point is it seems like there are an infinite number of possible thoughts to we can think of, and that's not possible, given materialism. — RogueAI

How important to you is materialism's rightness or wrongness? How important the number of possible thoughts?

We "hold stock" in various theologies, philosophies, theories, experiences, etc. Our "portfolio" is how we interpret the world.

Settle on what works best for you. From my own experience, "settling" can be a very fraught problem, loaded with conflicts, especially when there may not be a "final answer" possible.

if materialism is true, there are only a finite number of possible thoughts — RogueAI

I'm OK with there being a finite number of possible thoughts, given that the finite number of possible thoughts is really very hugely huge. Unless you can actually count all the grains of sand in the world (a very hugely huge finite number) or all the variations possible for snow flakes (no two are alike, supposedly) then the world is not impoverished by a finite number of sand grains or snow flakes. Or possible thoughts.

And it isn't enriched by an infinite number of possible thoughts, sand grains, or snow flakes. Just one of my extremely finite opinions, of course.

I don't know whether there are an infinite number of thoughts. I don't know where to begin thinking about an infinite number of thoughts.

The brain contains about 100 billion neurons. Connective tissue doesn't count. If a thought requires combinations of neurons, then there are more combinations possible among one's neurons than there are atoms in the universe. So I have heard, anyway. Since many of the thoughts that people have now and have had in the past are and were unexpressed or expressed and lost to time, it would appear that you have an excellent chance of producing and/or coming across thoughts which you have never encountered before. Ditto for everybody else.

Enjoy.

But the brain is a biological organ with cells that die and are replaced by new cells each day. — magritte

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but dead brain cells are generally not replaced. So, Magritte, if you drink yourself into oblivion tonight, you may lose a few thousand neurons to alcohol poisoning, They won't be back.

It's a miracle we remember anything — magritte

Well, our days are full of slop that isn't worth remembering anyway, so there's that. The upside of that is that since our brain neurons last a lifetime, the vast majority of them are on the job for life.

That said, there is also the fact of neuroplasticity. The operation of the brain changes over time from before birth to the grave. Learning requires physical changes in connections between neurons. If one part of the brain is destroyed by accident or disease, other parts of the brain MIGHT be able to pick up that function; not overnight, but in time. For instance, if you lose vision in both eyes, the visual cortex can acquire the task of interpreting Braille from your fingers. People have lost an entire hemisphere, and eventually the remaining hemisphere adapted.

There are pieces of the brain that must be intact for us to function, even live. Tiny areas in the brain stem control critical, essential functions like respiration, heart beat, and so on.

Henry Gustav Molaison is one of the most important and studied human research subjects of all time. He revolutionized what we know about memory today because of the amnesia he developed after a lobotomy in 1953 to treat the severe epilepsy he developed after a head injury sustained earlier in life.

Molaison lost the ability to transfer new short-term memories to long-term memory. New memories ceased after the surgery, but the pre-surgical memories remained intact. He couldn't live independently, but his personality and cognitive functions were pretty much intact. He worked with one researcher for 50 years, but each day she had to introduce herself to him as a new person.

He could hold instructions in short-term memory and carry out learning tasks, but none of that endured longer than a couple of hours or so.

I understand the stigma of mental illness; the situation is certainly better now than it was say 50, 60, 70, and more years back. Indeed, I think for some problems it has evaporated. "Depression", for instance, seems to have become a euphamism for loneliness, alienation, acute and chronic boredom, hurt, humiliation, anger, and so on. It seems harder for people to say "I'm lonely" than to say I'm depressed" (mentally ill). It's progress (sort of) for mental illness, but a disaster for the suffering which is caused by (what we can call) a deteriorating society.