emotions, though difficult, even impossible, to put into words, are, at the end of the day, physical in nature. As per physiologists, emotions are simply certain biomolecules attaching themselves to receptors on neurons, these events causing emotions. — TheMadFool

The music begins. Molecules of dopamine and serotonin are emitted, circulated, received, and up took. Perhaps you are with your partner, both hearing the music; you kiss, cuddle, and canoodle and some oxytocin is added to the mix. Warm moist rose colored light suffuses all. Lovely.

If you think emotional experiences were purely physical, would administering the proper dose of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin produce the same experience for you, sitting alone in cool, sterile lab room? I would think not. Chemicals do not make the music resonate with you, and kissing and cuddling a plastic mannequin would not be a warm fuzzy experience. There's too much content missing.

It seems like what neurotransmitters do is to actualize the emotions arising out of experiences, memory, or Imagination. If spiders frighten you, it isn't cortisol that will cause fear. Cortisol will enable you to get away (or to attack the room-sized arachnid).

Contrary to the preceding, when people experience psychotic mania, perhaps the chemicals come first, stimulate all sorts of wild thoughts (hallucinations, paranoia, intense fear, anxiety, anger, etc.) In this abnormal situation, the chemicals cause the experience of emotions in a very crude way,

I am both a soft-core Marxist and a soft-core Christian. My doubly soft-core social conscience compels me to at least try to understand the causes of the major injustices to which people are subjected. There are a couple of books which I think do a very good job of explaining why so many black people live in abject poverty:

#1 would be A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America by Elliott Currie. Currie isn't focused on police violence; he's more interested in the extremely high levels of violence within the black community--black on black. Why some groups, and some parts of the country have much higher levels of violence than others can be analyzed and understood. This issue (regional disparate levels of violence) was first given serious attention in about 1880. Some of what was found in 1880 is still true. But highly uneven access to opportunity and deep poverty are leading causes. That plus a plentiful supply of guns.

#2 would be the The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. Rothstein shows how US Government policy, particularly through the Federal Housing Administration, systematically favored two generations of white families with plentiful assistance in obtaining new suburban housing, while forcing black people to accept inner city housing (which usually meant living in a slum). The upshot of FHA policy is that by the time it was ended, discriminatory policy had greatly enriched white families while greatly impoverishing black families. Having been carried out coast to coast, the bad consequences of FHA policy would be extraordinarily difficult to undo or redress.

BLM tends to be way too focused on police violence. It is entirely understandable that minorities should be concerned about police violence: It's official violence performed by some level of the state. The state is supposed to protect citizens, not selectively oppress them. However, internecine violence claims many times the number of black people than those killed by the police.

Well, I've never met the founders of BLM, or even local coordinators. Alicia Garza said (in a quote Google found) "“We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk”. And that is a significant achievement.

I don't know what "a trained Marxist" would look like. There are people who read and discuss Marx and Engels; there are a few people who teach Marxism, and there are a few people who belong to very minor political parties that are "Marxist" or Marxish.

"We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories." I too am super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. Maybe you are also, sort of.

The people I referenced--who wouldn't have been able to present a cohesive ideological point of view--were not leaders; they were neighborhood people milling around watching the fires burn. Which is what I was doing, too.

Certainly, insurgencies can arise from the left as well as the right. At least in the United States at this time (last 20 to 30 years) it has been the white supremacist / anti-government right that has been the source--such as the individuals conspiring to kidnap the governor of Michigan. In the 1960s and 70s groups like the Bader Meinhof gang were leftist, and exceptionally violent. The Chicago Democratic Convention riot in 1968 was leftish.

I don't think BLM and ANTIFA are synonymous; their tactics seem to differ significantly. For one thing, BLM is able to marshal much larger and more diverse numbers in most parts of the country and they do not ordinarily spar with their opponents or police in the manner of ANTIFA--at least like in Portland, OR. BLM can mount very large, and pretty much peaceful demonstrations. Large demonstrations--left, right, or center--tend to be inconvenient for those not involved.

The riots we saw in late May and June were not as much partisan as opportunistic. Incidents which serve as provocations and then receive social media distribution, coupled with inflammatory rhetoric, can quickly wind up into riots. There was a small number of specifically ideologically left and right people present in the Minneapolis riots. Most of the people there (black, white, hispanic, asian) would have been hard put to present any sort of cohesive ideological point of view.

Of course the riot in Minneapolis spiraled out of control because there were no controls. Nobody was in charge of the riot.

if a convict is also more likely to be prototypical of their Gender in appearance or even hyper typical — Benj96

Why on earth would a convict be proto- or hyper-typical of their sex?

are we then as a society negatively selecting those physical (biochemical) or psychologically traits that led this person to behave as a criminal? — Benj96

I was just reading a book, 1877: Our Year of Living Violently (2010) by Michael Bellesiles in which the author references the thinking of some late 19th century prison enthusiasts EXACTLY along the lines you mention -- life imprisonment of 'hereditary paupers and criminals' would over time result in fewer paupers, fewer criminals, and fewer crimes.

Even in those "unenlightened ages" others suggested that it might be the case that upbringing and the environment had more to do with pauperism and criminal behavior than heredity. Moreover, the 1870s saw the US in a severe multi-year depression with national railroad strikes and minimal resources available to charitable organizations. If there was more crime (there seemed to be) perhaps it was because of Very Hard Times.

Another reason there was a lot of crime was that the southern states allowed concealed carrying of firearms, and many people carried guns with them. Minor disputes could escalate into a fatal shooting. Even school children sometimes carried concealed guns and sometimes used them to settle disagreements on the playground, Sound familiar?

Another factor was that southern courts refused to recognize murder as anything more than self-defense (unless it was a black-on-white killing) and would not convict. One of the reasons the southern courts behaved this way was that violence was a central piece of punishing black people for their mere existence. It was a harsh regime, and poor whites too were expected to toe the line. So, a lot of people got shot for bad, very bad, and absolutely atrocious reasons.

The general principle that "anything worth doing at all is worth doing well" certainly applies to masturbation. The experience of billions is that masturbation is imminently worth doing as often and as well as possible.

Kant:

Masturbation has been considered "A Problem" for quite a while--a perversion, an act against god (one ought to fuck a member of the opposite sex and beget children), an act against the state, an act against whoever wanted to feel aggrieved about it. It has variously been considered unhealthy, a drain of vital energies (see books about tantric sex) and precious bodily fluids (see Dr. Strangelove), and a crime. Some guys think it is an insult to their manhood that they should ever have to masturbate--somebody should jolly well make themselves available to fuck.

Fortunately a lot of people have dispensed with the nonsense of ages past and no longer give a rat's rear end what Immanuel Kant thought about masturbation.

"the word fascist is intended to mean oppressive, intolerant, chauvinist, genocidal, dictatorial, racist, or aggressive."

I think it was Paxton in Anatomy of Fascism who said that fascism is characterized by a method as much as its content. It has tended to be ruthlessly indifferent to prevailing democratic norms. The National Socialists in Germany (Hitler), for instance, seized power. Rarely, if ever, did the Nazi Party ever do well in elections (except when there was no choice but to vote for them).

Fascist parties have usually had a devoted following -- sometimes composed of odd bedfellows. Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, the various South American fascist-type dictators, etc. Fascist totalitarianism (like Hitler's) didn't leave room for an opposition.

Does the United States have a fascist movement? Some of the white supremacist militia types resemble fascists. But it doesn't matter in the end whether they fit the formal definition or not (whatever one uses). What does matter is that crypto or pre-fascist groups not be allowed to develop into militias, parties, or gangs that have the power to disrupt democratic society. (That's different than preventing them from speaking their opinions.).

Is Trump a fascist? I heartily loathe and despise Trump and his party, but I don't think he is a fascist. His behavior as president isn't even all that original. We've had grotesques serving in the Presidential Office before, and as regrettable as they are, they aren't fascists. They aren't eligible for summary execution. They are just abysmal people who should never have gotten anywhere close to nomination, let alone winning an election. For that you can lay blame the political parties, the media, and the idiots who supported them early on--usually wealthy people, which was the case with Hitler and a few other fascist dictators.

I will try not to drown in the deep seas of the unconscious mind which I wish to explore. — Jack Cummins

You can't drown in "the deep seas of the unconscious mind" because YOU are the deep sea. This isn't Freud. My theory is that "I" exist in the unconscious. Not Freud's SUBconscious sea of unutterable wishes, but my sea of enormous back-office operations where I exist outside the view of my front-office public relations staff, spies (observed sensory input), and all the public stuff. The front office (consciousness) isn't writing this. The public relations people are watching this as it goes up on the screen. The big Composition Group in the back office is putting the ideas together and sending it out to a transmission desk where fingers are instructed to hit the right keys.

I live in the unconscious, but I can't consciously observe my unconscious self because I am not exterior to it. I am in it, the interior. What goes on here can't be observed by the front office - conscious mind. The front office gets its marching orders from back here, not the other way around.

In my humble (maybe quite mistaken) opinion, we (front office consciousness) give ourselves too much credit. We tend to think we are in charge. We have a little control, but it's the back office that does the heavy lifting, major decision making, decides on priorities (like ending up at our favorite pub even though we said we would be home at 21:00. The back office decides how much risk to take, or not, often before the front office even knows it will soon be doing something it didn't plan on.

How can you tell whether what you are reading or hearing me say is coming from the unconscious or the conscious mind? You can't. The flow of instructions from the massive unconscious back office to the small conscious front office is seamless. What you see and hear is coming from the real me (the real person).

That's my theory, none of which should suggest that we can't drive ourselves crazy. There have been some pretty ugly conflicts in my back office which disrupted business for years on end. I just couldn't quite get my several idealist / realist / dreamy / pragmatist political parties to cooperate. So I was often working at cross purposes with myself.

Peace has reigned between my ears now for... maybe 8 years. Age and circumstances I wasn't in charge of brought me to retirement and living happily alone again. If I could take "where I am now" back to the time I was 30, say, "I could have been somebody -- I could have been a contender" (as Marlon Brando said in On the Waterfront 1954). Oh well...

So, ONE OF THE TASKS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY OR SELF-ANALYSIS is to learn how our minds actually are working--especially if they don't seem to be working all that well.

Happy, fully functioning, highly productive, sophisticated people can, I suppose, get along just fine without thinking about how their fucking splendid brains work. Most of us, though, find there are problems upstairs that have to be dealt with.

So question, @Jack Cummins: Why couldn't I figure all this out when I was 30?

I will be wanting to find the evidence to check my own sanity — Jack Cummins

Having to prove one's sanity by finding a lost reference to an obscure story sounds too Kafkaesque.

"Your Honor, the defendant can't produce the reference, so Counsel recommends that the Court proceed with the involuntary commitment."

I know one person who has undertaken proper psychoanalysis. This fellow has a very vigorous / rigorous intellect, is very well read, and engages with people at a demanding high level. His two mainstay intellectual pillars are Freud and Marx. He claims that psychoanalysis helped him a great deal.

One has to undertake psychoanalysis; it isn't a therapy that can be applied to a patient in the way medication can. Any talk therapy requires the cooperation and active participation of the patient, but psychoanalysis is a major project. Surely a belief or confidence in its efficacy is essential. Stupid, neurotic thinking just has to be sorted out, and it takes a committed patient, a very insightful therapist, and time.

On the other hand, drugs for a lot of major mental illness--like bi-polar, psychosis, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorders, etc-can be given to the patient without a whole lot of belief involved. Thorazine suppresses psychosis whether the patient believes it will work or not. All the couch time in the world isn't going to help someone who is so depressed they are catatonic.

Still, there are millions of ordinary people who are screwed up by their upbringing, life experiences, or flaws in their mental apparatuses. Unraveling how one got screwed up (like feeling intensely guilty for one's rather pedestrian sexual desires, or the ways in which one defeats one's best efforts, or why one is such a domineering son of a bitch, etc.) isn't something that medication will help.

My best guess is that it isn't so much the particular theory on which psychotherapy is based, but the commitment of the therapist and patient to work together to produce insight and a path to changing one's thinking. In the end, therapy means change, and it can take a long time. Hence the requirement for commitment to the process.

Lots of pioneers in psychology have influenced the way we think about the world (philosophy). A simple example: early on psychologists learned that a variable rate of reinforcement is far more powerful than a steady rate of reinforcement. Gambling is attractive because we win (and lose) unpredictably. If we always (or never) won at poker it wouldn't have such attraction. Variable reinforcement explains some of our thinking and behavior. Habits (little apps of learned behavior) have something to do with our success or failure in life. So on and so forth. Psychology (and people like Freud) have dethroned the autonomous self-directed person. We are not masters of our own houses.

All that should have a significant effect on philosophy.

What Freud developed that was seminal and useful was a psychodynamic theory of personality development. The id, ego, and superego weren't merely levels, they were interacting forces, operating in the subconscious, and under social demands, all of which has to be continually resolved by the individual. (There's more to psychodynamism, of course, than id, ego, and superego.)

Yes, Freud got penis envy wrong; it's a problem for us guys--we all have one, but envy others. We at least make comparisons whenever we get the chance. Even guys with enormous penises aren't always satisfied; as one well endowed guy confessed, "they attract too much attention".

Anyway, here's a song by somebody that doesn't have penis envy.

You don't know what you want. Neither do I. Few to none of us know what we REALLY want because what we really want has so rarely if ever been an option that we have so little real experience in considering it. — Hippyhead

Observing that "what we really want has so rarely if ever been an option" is a useful insight, assuming that what we think "we really want" really IS what we want. I wanted "meaningful and fulfilling work" and a couple of times I actually had it. But meaningful and fulfilling work is scarce, and routinized work (as it always becomes) is a pretty much a drag.

What I have really wanted I finally obtained when I retired. I stopped 'working' altogether and now just do whatever I feel like doing, which is mostly reading, listening to music, absorbing information, thinking, feeding, sleeping, etc. There are chores that have to be done, but I can tolerate that.

Unfortunately 99% of us can not retire before we spend our drab wretched lives at work to MAYBE save enough to finally stop working at 65 and finally just do what we feel like doing. Talk about delayed gratification!

Another problem is that we can't choose what we want. We have attacks of wanting that are generally -- and on even brief reflection -- irrational, but stupid never stopped anybody from wanting something. That's what keeps the economy humming along. I recently had an attack of wanting a pair of expensive (on sale) boots that I did not need, by any stretch. Fortunately I dithered and they went back to their regular ridiculous undesirable price. No instant gratification--a loss for our GDP.

we all thought that Bush was the worst — Mr Bee

The Republicans have been electing a downward spiraling list of candidates since... Eisenhower in 1952.

1960 -- Nixon (slimy)
1968 -- Nixon -- not the worst president, even though he was a crook, slimier
1972 -- Nixon -- resigned in disgrace, slimiest
1980 -- Reagan (deplorable)
1984 -- Reagan (senile and more deplorable)
1992 -- H. W. Bush -- poor, but at least he had the insight to call out Reagan's "voodoo economics"
2000 -- G. W. Bush (abysmal)
2004 -- G. W. Bush (abysmal)
2016 -- Dildo Trump (sub-abysmal)

When does history begin? With the Big Bang? Life arising on earth? the appearance of Homo sapiens? Settled life 12,000 years ago? The rise of the city state? The invention of writing? Or 2000, as some history teachers say their students think?

As for the driving force behind history--maybe a better question would be "What is the driving force behind human affairs?" DNA? Sex? Security (food, clothing, shelter...)? Ego? Economics? Religion? Politics? We became a species and were successful hunter-gatherers for maybe 200 or 300,000 years, during which "economics" was absent. Do those hundreds of thousands of years not count in our reckoning?

I wasn't there so I don't know--and I don't think anybody else does either--why we stopped being successful hunter-gatherers and started becoming successful farmers and villagers. James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States thinks that agriculture was more like a conspiracy than an opportunity. It was a way of settling people down and then using them for plutocratic purposes. Whether Scott is right or not, don't know. His is at least an interesting proposal to think about.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Well, maybe not. We have had hierarchies of prowess, holiness, wealth, strength, and so forth, Classes, if you will, a long time. But to collapse 12,000 years of settled life and then say that what was going on in the wake of the industrial revolution in the 19th century characterizes all of history could be, perhaps, possibly, BOGUS. A mistake. Error. Over-generalization.

(Ok, off to the firing squad with you, Crank -- this is totally heretical and anti-revolutionary thought.)

Well are you a woman or disabled? — BitconnectCarlos

Others have had liberation movements as well. Gay liberation was a high water mark for me, but it would be absurd to claim it as the driving force behind history. I'm not sure that class struggle is the driving force behind history either.

The idea that there is a "driving force" behind history leads to teleological delusions -- like those embedded in the cliché that so-and-so or such-and-such "changed the course of history". The invention of dynamite changed the course of history. John F. Kennedy's assassination (or 9/11) changed the course of history. Facebook changed the course of history. As if anyone knew where history intending to go before dynamite, JFK, 9/11, or Facebook came along, from outside of history, to redirect the course of time.

History wasn't headed anywhere, so it couldn't change it's direction. Per the Cheshire Cat to Alice, "if you don't know where you are going, it doesn't matter how you get there."

History is what happened, and we don't know what it is until after it happens. Then something else happens. And so on. One damned thing after another.

Still, there are trends. The atmosphere and the oceans are warming up. The population of the globe continues to grow. Every day Amazon sells more stuff. But a trend as seen in the rear view mirror then predicted down the road isn't the same as history going some place.

The Iraq war was misbegotten from the beginning. The justification (that they were working on nuclear weapons) was a lie told to the American people, and everybody else. Worse, the US did not display insight into how to remove a mostly hated dictator without collapsing the whole society into chaos from which they have still not recovered. It was an altogether inhumane AND incompetent operation.

Let's turn to Iran, your preferred target. True, they were (probably still are) working on nuclear weapons and a rocket program with which to deliver them, but the US is not their target, as far as I know. A more likely target would be Israel or Saudi Arabia. Of the two, Saudi Arabia may have an edge in preferment.

The Iranian people will have to work out their own liberation -- not because nobody cares about them, but because it seems highly unlikely that the US, or any other power, can confer liberation upon them. We contributed a great deal to the Iranian people's previous suffering under the Shah. Let's not repeat the gift.

According to William Faulkner, ""The past is never dead. It's not even past." So there is that.

(The quote is from "Requiem For a Nun". It's not a religious book. The "nun" is a prostitute.)

By American exceptionalism, I meant that the US does the things it condemns others for. — frank

That is merely diplomatic hypocrisy. All very routine and customary. But it is unavoidable. Personally, I'm kind of naive. I'm always shocked when I see politicians behaving hypocritically.

Just because a lot of our wealth once depended on slavery should not prevent us from condemning slavery where it is still carried out. Just because we practiced genocide must not prevent us from condemning it elsewhere. Just because we have some liars, thieves, knaves, and scoundrels employed in government doesn't mean we can't condemn corruption elsewhere.

What is Important is for citizens is to be honest with themselves about their country's real history. I can not think of a nation that does not have plenty of bad history for which they ought to beg pardon.

Nations are all exceptional and they are all alike and different. Finland and Spain, Japan and Uganda, Russia and India, and so on. Politicians at the Helm of the State pursue what they think the nation's collective interests are. They can be quite mistaken, of course, with disastrous consequences.

So we aren't gorillas, we're civilized humans. — frank

Well... that would be nice.

Not to cast aspersions on gorillas, but the most elegant civilized being still has a primate limbic system humming away, which accounts for a lot of the sturm and drang of human existence. In Trump there is very little sublimation of emotions: his raw emotions just spatter everyone around him. A consummate diplomat (or con man) has his or her emotions under tight control.

Political realism — frank

Political Realism understands that exercising power can be a dirty business, but is nonetheless necessary. A realistic politician understand that he will get his or her hands dirty in the process, even when doing good.

I do not think "comfort" is a significant philosophical problem. The phrase "I am not comfortable with..." is a euphemism, a dodge, or perhaps even an empty expression. Certainly. it has been used far too often to retain any vitality. One could say, "I find the idea of a second Trump term nauseating." Or one could say "I am not comfortable with a second Trump term." Which one leaves the speaker the most wiggle room?

The word "comfort", and its derivatives (comfortable, uncomfortable, discomfort) have been enjoying an increase in popularity during the last 40 years. (information source: Google Ngram produces stats on the use of words in print over the last 220 years.)

Here's the frequency history for "uncomfortable":



"Comfort" and the other 3 derivatives have similar frequency histories. I've noticed the increased use of "comfort" and derivatives. I haven't yet starting loathing the term, or begun wishing to kick the "comfortable" user in the teeth, but... it's only a matter of time.

Why? Don't know. The popularity of words varies over time.

A laudable and economical proposal.

The Color of Law by Rothstein and A Peculiar Indifference by Elliott Currie provide a solid understanding of how housing segregation was engineered in the 20th century, and how the black population has been subjected to high levels of violence, both from within and without its communities.

Michael Bellesiles' 1877: America's Year of Living Violently [2010) and C. Vann Woodward's Strange History of Jim Crow (first published in 1955) describe how the black, hispanic, and Chinese populations were marginalized in the 19th century.

The lesson I take away from these books is that the elite moved deliberately and strategically to keep the majority white working class and minorities physically apart, and socially distanced as well -- by a lot more than 6 feet.

These and similar books explain much more than a BLM protest can. For one, they show how CLASS figures into systematic oppression in a way that a focus on RACE alone can not.

The Anatomy of Facism — darthbarracuda

Said to be the best available book on fascism. Someone (can't remember, might have been Paxton) noted that fascism is as much method as content. In other words, it isn't just what it attempts to achieve, but it's also its method.

What seems like a fascistic tendency in the Trump / Republican / right wing method is to blur certainty over what has been said (Trump says something quite objectionable, then a day later says the opposite). So then, what does the president mean? It's open ended. Years of this degrade political discourse to the point of meaninglessness.

Disregard for time-honored procedure, such as the Republican refusal to confirm Obama's last Supreme Court Nominee Garland, when 9 months remained in the year, then the rushed confirmation of nominee Barrett with 3 months remaining in the year. That alone isn't fascism, but it's part of a trend.

At the early end of Reconstruction (which had scarcely progressed towards completion) the newly elected Rutherford B. Hayes acquiesced to the former Confederate states becoming "the solid south" a one-party region of white oligarchic terroristic rule over blacks, poor whites, and hispanics (in Texas and the SW territories). Nobody called it fascism (the term hadn't been invented yet) but it was a variety of American fascism in place for about a century - 1877 to 1977, give or take a few years.

The Democratic Party in the south held a tight grip on the Senate and was able to impose it's preferred CIVIL ILLIBERTIES on the rest of the nation. For instance, blacks (mostly agricultural workers and domestics in the south) were initially left out of the social security, unemployment, and disability programs instituted in the New Deal. That was corrected fairly soon, but blacks were excluded from the federal housing program beginning in the 1930s and going forward (well into the 1970s). After courts and legislation remedied the exclusion, other mechanisms of discrimination were in place. The overall effect of the solid south strategy was a permanent marginalization of the black population. That 140 years after the fascist take-over of the south.

Fascism (in effect, if not in name) was established in the south through violence -- and flagrant violation of voting rights and constitutional protections.

I've tried to read Celine and haven't had much luck getting into Journey to the End of the Night. I should check out Becker and Horney. It's been... 50 years? since I last read about them.

name one event in a bullet's trajectory that isn't determined. — TheMadFool

Once the bullet leaves the gun, its trajectory is determined. But the moment the fool waving the gun around pulls the trigger is determined by chance. Not patternless?

BitterCrank, wear :mask: and stay safe. :smile: — TheMadFool

I do, you too.

I think I understand your clear explanation.

Chance events seem like they are part of the knowable universe. We don't know when they will occur, just that they do. And when they do, chance events will be entirely consistent with the behavior of physical objects.

Lots of people have guns, bullets, and hands to hold, point, and fire off bullets on any number of trajectories. The behavior of the bullet is entirely determined, but which trajectory the bullet will follow depends on events which are not lawful (determined)--all the factors connected with the firing of the gun.

So, if a bullet's trajectory from a gun located a considerable distance away should by chance pass through the container of gas particles, the shattering of the glass and the dispersal of the particles, will all be perfectly 'lawful'. But there is no law that states no bullet will be launched on a container-smashing-gas-particle-scattering trajectory.

That's my view. If you don't agree, that's fine; there's a chance that you won't.

There's a chance that you won't because, by chance, a highly charged particle may have passed through your brain and disrupted the critical processes of one neuron which was pivotal in determining the way you think about chance.

Given the number of highly charged particles in the universe, it's amazing we are able to think at all.

That you have sent a message to other people would seem to cancel out the idea that you are the only one in existence, or that you believe you are the only one in existence.

Still, solipsism is an idea (or a delusion, obsession, or some other form of erroneous thinking) that many have played around with.

Best practice: Think about it for a while, then move on to something more useful.

You "seem" (appearances may be deceiving) to be using it as a definite, fixed quality. Hey, if your not -- splendid. It just seemed that way to me. But then, I am not omniscient, relative to god, anyway.

weakness — kudos

"Strong" and "weak" are relative terms. It seems like an error to use it as a definite, fixed feature.

Are you arguing that the motion of small solid bodies in the solar system -- interacting with each other, the planets, and the sun -- are not subject to chance [unpredictable interactions], even while strictly obeying the laws of physics? Or are you proposing that "chance" is the result of inadequately observed causation?

But is it good that chance play such a role? — kudos

Good or not, chance is a factor in life. It just IS. What is bad is ignoring the part that chance events play (positive. indifferent, and negative). Unless one thinks that there is a string of implacable deterministic causation from the Big Bang down to this paragraph, then chance is a given.

Does our weakness make our existence a crude reality, or is it fundamental to our animal nature that we be submissive, fail at things, imperfect in different ways; Is that a core component of who we are or our real nature? — kudos

Weakness, submissiveness, failure, imperfections... fundamental to our animal nature? Not in my book!

We 'compounded beings' are an amalgam of strengths, flaws, failures, successes, wisdom, stupidity, and so on. Put crudely, we are primates with an overly developed frontal cortex (intellect) driven by a limbic system which evolved to assist survival in the jungle. Our emotions are vital, but they are volatile, and powerful. We prize our intellect, but without our wild emotions, what would we ever accomplish? Nothing.

Our "core, or real nature", is contradictory. On the one hand, we can reason; apply logic; develop deep insights; construct models of the world. On the other hand, opposite the deep thinker, we can fall stupidly in love, fly into a rage, commit arson, rape, and bloody murder, and then again, suddenly be as gentle as a kitten.

A core piece of human reality is that we are barely masters of our own houses (our minds).

So, we go through our lives, sometimes lasting more than a century, as a bundle of contradictory desires, wishes, fears, and hopes. That's kind of who we are. Some people, or maybe beneficiaries of chance, go through life at peace with their different parts. Or maybe the clamped a heavy cover on all that and just ignore it. Some people have a stormy relationship with their parts. They aren't at peace with it all, but that doesn't mean they are miserable. Some people like southern California weather -- nice all the time -- and some people like to have the occasional tornado, violent thunderstorm, blizzard, or the perfect autumn day.

Does that help any?

we could compare human actions with the animal who does not choose it's own death, but acts it ou — kudos

What animal is that?

Death by shotgun... seems excessive, but maybe that's just me. — kudos

It is just you. If you lived where there are a lot of bears, and one of them was running your way with you on the menu, you'd be happy to have a shotgun handy. What would you use -- a sling shot? A BB gun? You'd fulfill the bear's desire for "Kudos al Fresco"

You already know about what I am going to say here, but... I'll press ahead. Strengths, weaknesses, talents, skills, abilities, capacities, traits and so on are generally manifested on a continuum, and their locations on a continuum are mixed as well. So a given lion may have above average vision (for a lion), average hearing, lower than average endurance in a sprint, an exquisite sense of smell, and may not be as intelligent as another lion. The same distribution applies to a given wildebeest. So, survival is the result--to at least a significant degree--of luck. If the lion with less endurance happens to be chasing a lame wildebeest with terrific endurance, the lion may go hungry that time.

Among humans, one sometimes meets people who seem to have nothing much going for them (homely, not very smart, not physically gifted, etc.) but who are persistent and manage to keep body and soul together for a long time and die of old age in their own bed. How can that be? As The Preacher in Ecclesiastes put it, "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but time and chance happen to all."

I am here today, writing to you, because on a number of occasions accidents were less damaging than they VERY EASILY could have been; I didn't get AIDS, but I certainly could have, and so on. It wasn't because of caution, immense prudence, or foresight that I am still here. It was LUCK, True enough, most of the time I lived a conventional life; I went to work, did my job, saved my pennies, ate a healthy diet, exercised, didn't do drugs, or smoke and drink too much for too long a period. But I was also a risk taker, and if you take enough risks, eventually one will get nailed. I backed off risk enough to survive.

The squirrels that get run over are not examples of unfitness. They are victims of bad luck. Their species didn't evolve to have an understanding of moving vehicles, so whether they are squashed or not is a matter of luck. Some animals are more adaptable. When one bikes down a street where there are lots of pigeons, the birds don't fly away as one approaches. They hop a few inches to get out of the way. Squirrels aren't equipped to do that. On the other hand, squirrels recover 90% of the walnuts they bury. Pigeons aren't equipped to remember where several hundred walnuts are.

1) Actions that counter animal's individual interest — kudos

One example of this would be bears which discover garbage. A smorgasbord of stuff is suddenly available, most of which isn't healthy for bears as a steady diet, and displaces their normal diet of stuff like berries, fish, grubs, meat, and so on. Bears seem to be sated the same way that people who eat too much garbage feel sated. Fed and feeling full, but deriving too little essential nutrition along with the calories. The bears are likely to become sick. Plus, the garbage-dump bears become a nuisance (they are too dangerous to have around) so can lead to their deaths by shotgun.

2) Success in such as way as its interests or needs could be better satisfied — kudos

I can't think of an example that fits this. What did you have in mind.

3) Individual interest that counters possibility for survival, or sexual selection — kudos

Sometimes "odd couples" form, often involving at least one domesticated animal, but not always. Like a goose and a dog, or a horse and a goat. Aside from companionship and ending up on YouTube, there is no advantage to the animals in the odd couple. They are never going to mate.

Celibate religious are an example of principle 3. It may help an individual's survival (monasteries are usually safe places), but one definitely won't reproduce, if one is faithful to one's vows.

A discontinuity between one animal, Homo sapiens or birds... take your pick, and all other animals is completely insupportable. There are some genes that have been preserved over a billion years, and exist in single cell and vertebrate animals like ourselves.

It's probably safe to say that humans fail to survive in ways very much like other animals. Inattentive animals end up getting run over by automobiles, for instance, whether they be squirrels or people. Disease is a great leveler across the plant and animal kingdoms. So is predation. Humans may be a top predator now, but we have not always been at the top, and when it comes to the competition between pathogens and animals, our superiority (with antibiotics) is a flash in the pan. An unarmed person has no particular advantage in a confrontation with a polar bear or a grizzly. If we can't run fast enough and hide, we stand a good chance of being eaten.

Even oddities like homosexuality show up across species, appearing in mammals and birds, and of course, humans. Male pairs of ducks, for instance, have been observed stealing eggs from other nests in order to have eggs to hatch. Surviving members of geese couples (gay and straight) seem to mourn the loss of their mate. No reason why they wouldn't -- the avian limbic system isn't all that different than ours.

There are areas of evolutionary thinking which get kind of "squishy" -- that is, not on such solid ground. Evolutionary psychology is an example. It seems obvious that evolution has contributed to human psychology as it stands today, but projecting ancient situations which shaped our present psychology is impossible to substantiate. Taking depression as an example, some people imagine situations in our distant past (say, 200,000 years ago) when and where a 'depressive' personality would have been beneficial to individual and group survival. The 'on edge' person would be hyper-alert to threat.

Well maybe, maybe not, and how the hell would we know?

Then too, "depression" as it is tossed about these days can mean all sorts of things.

Steven Pinker proposes that we are less violent today than we were in the stone ages, not because we have evolved into a peaceable species, but because we developed centralized control -- the city state first, then later the larger state, which enforced more cooperative peaceable behavior. Take away centralized control, and maybe we would revert to a more violent norm.

Did evolution play a role in the development of the city state around 5 to 7,000 years ago? Seem like a very late development to pin on Darwin. Grain probably had more to do with it than anything else.

Dogs and humans formed a pretty strong connection around 20,000 years ago. Was that evolution or selective breeding (which is, in a way, fast evolution)? Russian biologists have shown that silver fox (a generally unfriendly species with nice fur) can be bred into a docile dog like animal without its nice fur and wild behavior in the space of a human lifetime (so, 30 to 50 generations of yearly breeding fox). Whether humans or dogs initiated domestication is hard to say. Based on the manipulative abilities of dogs I have known, they probably instigated their domestication. They saw in us a very good deal, available to them at the cost of friendly tail wagging, eye contact, a little snuggling, and the like.

I've been a member of this and its predecessor forum for at least 10 years. There are a lot of people here who accept evolution, because the membership is fairly well educated, and most educated people accept evolution as a set of sound principles. There are also people here who think that the mind is not located in the brain. It would be hard to fit a brainless mind into evolution. There are also a fair number of people here, educated or not, who do not know much about evolution. So no. I don't thing you have discovered a nest of Darwinians.

What is it about Darwin that you find disturbing?

Oh, I didn't know I was a 'die hard Darwinist'. But sure, evolution applies to human beings, as does natural selection and more. There is more because of our capacity for and dependence on language and culture. We inherited our 'capacity' but we created the content by ourselves, though we were likely nudged in various directions by some of those vulnerabilities you alluded to. Like religion. We didn't get religion from biology, but biology seems to have given us the capacity to imagine sky gods vividly enough that our creations could scare us silly.

I have lots of weaknesses: old, arthritic, going blind, gay, overly opinionated, depressed, and so on. I'm not very strong now, though at my best I was a pretty good long-distance cyclist -- not fast but persistent. I swam, jogged, did calisthenics, etc. I've accepted the cards I've been dealt and am more or less, pretty happy. Though, the ice on which I am standing isn't all that thick.

BTW, I like your banana and hammer image.

If we as species and not as individuals did always make the right choice, don't you agree that it would kill us? — kudos

I don't see why it would, but there is zero likelihood of our species always making the right choice -- or even always choosing the lesser of two evils.

"If the ends do not justify the means, what in God's name does?" some famous person said.

Successful people usually have SOMETHING going for them -- quite often a highly successful parent or grandparent. The various children of John D. Rockefeller Sr., Abigail, John III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David had their success handed to them on heavy silver platters. I'm not suggesting that any of the children were morons, but it does help having one of the richest men on earth as a parent.

There are people who choose, or accept, their weakness, their vulnerability. Some of them tread the paths leading to holiness -- Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. There are people who accept their low status, for any number of reasons (too complicated a topic for here and now). Some of these people strike one as saintlike, or maybe as freakishly weird, depending. Or maybe ready to be taken to the home for the very very confused.

↪Bitter Crank Let's be realistic though and boil it down to the absolute most weak person. They're not smart, physically fit, they fail at everything they try, no achievements, no social skills; they've effectively 'turned off, tuned out, and dropped out.' Would you then at least say it were fit to call this person weak in a comparable manner to what we deem as animal weakness (which is not by any means rigorously understood)? — kudos

The absolute most weak person is a bit hard to imagine having much of a role of any kind in society.

I'm a bit lost as to what you are aiming for.

In terms of physical strength... sure, one can compare a weak horse to a strong horse in the same way one can compare a weak man to a strong man. Strength is an advantage, weakness isn't. A strong lion will bring down a wildebeest more often than a weak lion.

Considering your clarification...

By weakness I mean the common usage, making the wrong decisions, failing at things, self-destructive behaviour, depression, anxiety, being a nerd, a loser, a freak, and so forth - even disposition towards actions such as being overly generous, trusting, or gullible. — kudos

strength and weakness are not as clearly differentiable among we humans. Is being a computer nerd a strength or a weakness? The handsome, healthy, hot athlete may get to mate more often, but if what is needed at the time is insight into printed circuitry and code, how useful will the hunk be? Fun to fuck but after that... pffft.

There have been a number of discussions here about the evolutionary value of depression. What good is it? Not sure myself, but some people think that "depression" has value to the group because anxious depressed people are sensitive to potentially dangerous situations that the hale and hearty are not. Personally, I haven't found depression to be an advantage, though it might lead to insights that a mentally robust person wouldn't arrive at. And not all insights are equally useful or healthy. Sometimes it is better to not look behind the curtain.

Loners, Freaks, losers, nerds, et al living outside convention as they do a good share of the time, can bring fresh perspectives to the community. Some of our great inventors, authors, artists, musicians, etc. were loners, losers, freaks, nerds, and worse--if you can imagine anything worse. (Most of the greats were more or less socially successful, but not all of them were.)

So, among human society, weakness and strength are not as obvious as they are among animals. Sometimes strength comes from being an alienated, dysfunctional outsider. An outsider will probably have better vision to see society as only an outsider can.

Take Thorsten Veblen, a late 19th century, early 20th century economist and sociologist. Some of his outsider traits enabled him to see the purpose of large, carefully tended lawns: They are conspicuous consumption -- proof that one has a lot of money to maintain a perfectly useless field of grass on which no sheep or cow will ever graze. It is difficult to get such insights into society from the perspective of a socially successful person. To the wealthy-enough homeowner, the large lawn is inherently justifiable, and worth all the work that goes into it.

A weed patch in front of the house, on the other hand, is proof of one's failure in society. Success = nice grass; failure = weeds. I have weeds in my lawn. I agree with Veblen: large chemically dosed lawns are bullshit and ought to be stamped out. Screw the middle class lawn mower.

Maybe we're getting a little hung up on the biology analogy. — kudos

If so, then the misdirection is yours. Starting out with "In natural predator-prey relationships if a predator is so strong a hunter it proliferates and the prey population declines..." is a pretty strong indication of what a reader would think you were getting at. Let me take a minute to vent:

The OP goes in one direction, then after a few entries, the original poster announces "Oh, well that isn't what I meant." Hey, it's the job of a thread creator to get it right from the beginning. (You are one of a number of people who do this,)

In your response, you said "you'd reproduce more just the same as a predator would prey more". Kudos, if you want to talk about human existential questions, morality, and the like, then leave the biological alone (because they misdirect the reader).

You seem to be reaching for a paradox about weakness and strength -- and they are sometimes in paradoxical relationships. The Taoist talks about how a "weak" willow bends in the wind and is not damaged, while the "strong" oak resists the wind and is broken. So, which one is strong and which one is weak? Paradox.

Oh, look: Unenlightened just quoted Lao Tzu--stealing my thunder right out from under me!

Would you say in this sense that weakness is necessary for survival — kudos

"Weakness" and "strength" are too heavily loaded with moral connotations to be very helpful in describing ecological relationships.

What is necessary for survival is a more-or-less sustainable balance between predator/prey animals and plant communities. As @Frank noted, a sustainable balance can be disrupted and various species adapt or become extinct.

Example: The glaciated regions of North America were scraped down to the rocks, then layered over with 'drift'. Over 10-15,000 years, plant and animal communities repopulated the glaciated areas. When Europeans de- and re- populated North America, they brought with them a variety of 'exotic' species which were native to Europe. One of those was the large earth worm, longer and bigger than the earthworms that were native to North America. The exotic earthworms eventually reached the northern forests, where they commenced rapidly chewing up leaf litter at a much higher rate than the native worms did. This is a relatively recent development and it is changing the ecology of the forests. How this will play out in the future is unknown.

It doesn't make sense to oppose one worm as 'weak' and the other as 'strong'. They are both strong--but one is larger than the other and they eat more.