So, is there some golden mean of 'control' towards which we ought to strive towards? — Posty McPostface

One thing an individual can do is save some money--enough to get by on, living cheaply, for 6 months. Let's say that one can live cheaply for $2000 a month. Save up $12,000. If you have enough money to live on (cheaply) for 6 months, you will be able to afford getting fired from a job. If you get fired, you can collect unemployment for 6 months -- and still have another 6 months left.

If you have $12,000 in the bank (hell, if you have $5,000 in the bank) you can weather minor emergencies. Major emergencies -- no, but then, if they are major enough, nobody can weather them without big problems.

If you have enough to live cheaply for 6 months, you can afford to work on and off to keep from going broke too quickly. $12,000 gives you a significant amount of control, and freedom. As much less than $2000 a month that you can live on, the less you have to save.

How do you save 12,000 a month? You live cheaply and save as large a percentage of your income as you can manage. You can have bad habits and minor vices, but they have to be inexpensive. You take public transit instead of buying a car. You live in a little apartment instead of a nice big one. You wear your clothes out. You don't travel, except by hitchhiking, staying with friends or tricks, or the sleaziest of hotels.

Doesn't this take all the joy out of life? Not really. For one thing, this is temporary. It's a short term project to save enough to allow you to take risks with employment. Having college debt, a mortgage, credit card debt, and expensive vices means YOU HAVE TO KEEP WORKING UNTIL YOU DIE. You can't stop, because a swarm of debt collecting vultures is always circling overhead, waiting for a missed payment.

I treat life more like a sailor — Rich

In this manner I learn — Rich

Until the damn boat sinks, then we're done.

No, I am just an average Joe - nothing special, no special talents or skills really. — Dachshund

All that seems to be true.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Even though Jefferson was a Deist (and not a Theist) the concept of a god-created world would have been part of his world-view. "All men are created equal" by their Creator.

All men (humans) are equal before God as products of God's creative power. There is nothing in the concept of egalitarian creation that conflicts with men (humans) occupying all sorts of different stations in life, from King of England on down to the lowliest field slave.

Did Jefferson ever claim that everyone was going to equal in the future? I don't think so. Can a slave and a slave owner be equal before God? Yes. Did Jefferson have doubts about the morality of slavery? Yes: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever."

You are getting hung up by insisting on rhetorical consistency. People, you may have noticed, are consistently inconsistent. If they aren't inconsistent right now, they will be inconsistent later today. Tomorrow at the latest. Everyone is inconsistent except me and thee, and even thee was inconsistent just the other day.

Was that estimation peer reviewed?

You know, "consent" is kind of tricky business. If you go to the hospital, you will be asked (kind of required, really) to sign a consent form giving the hospital permission to provide treatment to you. You sign it, of course, because if you don't the hospital isn't going to do much for you. But when you give consent at a hospital, you are consenting to various unknown possibilities.

I'm a gay man who was once very sexually active (sigh). Age has since snowed white hair on my head and cooled my carnal enthusiasms. As a mature adult (before and after reaching 40) I sometimes "consented" to sex with other men that turned out to be ill advised in retrospect (interest = consent). I was never risk averse in sexual encounters. Some people are very risk averse, and shy away from situations that present any risk whatsoever.

One of the "risks" of having sex at 14, 15, 16, or at 30, 40, or 50 is that one may regret having taken risks that one later feels were too high or not rewarding enough. Exactly what happened in an encounter is always subject to reinterpretation later--and this is true whether we are talking about sex, medical treatment, financial activity, trying out herbicides on the lawn, and so on. Maybe the sexual experience wasn't as great as one hoped it would be. Maybe a sexual partner had annoying habits; wore too much cologne; popped chewing gum constantly; didn't make the right moves, didn't measure up to expectations, etc. Or, in one case, was far more progressed with AIDS than I thought.

I had sex as a minor, sex which also happened to be illegal at the time on a couple of different counts, with a guy who was about 10 years older than me. I later had regrets about it, NOT because I was abused in some way -- I don't feel I was abused, though I had been carefully seduced and coaxed into the encounter. The sexual relationship went on for several years, and while I was glad to have sex available, I just didn't like the guy that much. I regretted it. I wished it had not happened. (What I really wished was that it had happened, even earlier, with somebody else.)

I didn't give "consent" the way "consent" is now interpreted. I'm still OK with that part. Where this relationship became really problematic was when the desperate neediness of this guy resulted in intrusive, highly inconvenient behavior. Worse, he was kind of like velcro and I couldn't figure out then how to get him unstuck. I wasn't quite mature enough to call his suicidal bluff, a device he used a couple of times to get me to come visit him a few hundred miles away.

So, a first sexual encounter, whether consented or unconsented, can have unforeseen consequences, which we may or may not regret for various reasons. We don't know, sometimes, to what, exactly, we might be consenting.

As an analogy to help you see where I am coming from, consider product reviews on Amazon. Assuming that they are truthful, you'd probably consider it some evidence as to the quality of the product if you had no experience with the product in question. — Tree Falls

But the effect is the same whether the reviews are truthful or not, which of course, we don't know.

That depends on whether you are very attractive without pants and socks.

Would the difference between telling my friends and telling the world be the private versus public nature of the statement? — Tree Falls

Yes, the public vs. the private is a piece of it. When I say, "Due process. You are not a court." I mean
"you have not seen evidence from a prosecutor and the defense. You have heard no witnesses. You have not heard arguments by both sides; there has been no expert testimony. You are not a jury. You do not have the authority (like, given to you by the state) to declare to the public that your brother is a menace to young womanhood.

Limiting your action to members of your family and the couple with the 14 year old may damage relationship; may prevent harm; may cause harm; but, it is limited to yourself, your parents, your brother, and the couple with the 14 year old. That's already 7 people who might wish you had kept your nose out of it.

If you post your considered but unsubstantiated opinion on a public web site, the whole thing gets messier and nastier.

Of course, you are weighing the good of preventing the 14 year old from having an unpleasant encounter with your brother (the assumption being that it will be unpleasant) against the harm of doing nothing.

The situation recalls a piece of Buddhist advice, modeled after a cliche: "Don't just do something; stand there." Sometimes doing nothing is the best choice because you can not predict what any outcome will be.

In my own family I witnessed a very well-intentioned intervention to protect a sibling and child which poisoned relationships within the family for decades afterwards. I can't say that it was worth it. Once done, it could not be undone.

Once you are convinced of the righteousness of your proposed action, you, like me and everybody else, will put the pedal to the metal and roar off down the road to your good, bad, or indifferent rendezvous with destiny.

Good luck.

Could you expand on why you think a public warning seems too much? — Tree Falls

Due process. You are not a court.

So, to clarify, you wouldn't tell your friend that your brother might try to have sex with his 16 year old daughter, given your brother's past history? — Tree Falls

What I meant by "Keep it in the family." would include the parents of the 14 year old visiting your family. Though, it might be more appropriate for your parents than you to discuss this with the parents of the 14 year old. The 14 year old should be included in a discussion about the matter, but it definitely is NOT your place to broach the topic with her alone, apart from her parents.

So, it looks like you have decided to publicize the facts and your suspicions about your brothers' sexual preferences either to the world, or to those immediately involved. My advice remains to "stick to those immediately involved and leave the world out of it".

Whatever you do, you won't be able to undo it. The web-site blatt would be pretty much impossible to recall or undo, so you should just not go there. If your brother ends up having sex with the 14 year old, and if her parents know about it and object, they can report your brother to the police and then the police can do whatever they will do.

Bear in mind, a round of hysteria within her family and police involvement might be worse for the 14 year old than the sex itself.

We live in 21st century U.S. For better or for worse, we have at least a double standard about sex. Nothing new in that statement. In various 21st century countries around the world, what is considered "old enough" varies, though 15, 16, or 17 seem to be the most common ages of consent. Even in the US, quite a few states have legislated that age-of-consent limitations don't apply to people within a 3 or 4 year age range. So, in these states, a 14 year old and a 18 year old would violate no laws about age of consent. Across the border in another state, a 17.9 year old and an 18 year old would be violating the law.

At various times in our history (not talking ancient history here, either--referencing 20th century) the standards of what was considered acceptable and unacceptable were fuzzier than they are now. There is no world-wide consensus, no over-time consensus, on sex and age differences. Almost everyone agrees that pre-pubescent children should not be approached for sex by older people.

So stopping the sale of guns can save lives. Of course, that's constitutionally not entirely feasible but... — Benkei

Yes, that small constitutional problem... Actually, the interpretation that everyone may own any gun is a recent interpretation (like, less than 50 years ago).

You could outlaw carrying or keeping certain guns that are particularly effective in gun massacres (assault rifles, bump stocks). — Benkei

Good idea. We'll just try to get that law passed.

meanwhile confiscate when seen or found. Reward people for turning them in. Jail time after 5 years. — Benkei

More constitutional problems. Buying guns off the street... sure.

gun laws reduce gun homicides — Benkei

I'm sure they do. The problem is getting them passed and past a court review.

the "good guy with a gun" bullshit — Benkei

Agreed. Total bullshit.

Benkei, I'm not perplexed because I haven't thought of any of this; I'm perplexed because there are

a) so damned many political barriers, given politics operating the way it does.
b) so damned many guns already installed.

Yes, guns wear out, they rust, break, etc. But we have to assume that EVEN IF we stopped further gun production and sales today, (which I am in favor of) it would take many years to exhaust the existing inventory.

A ban on ammunition would perhaps be more effective. Bullets are a disposable one-use product. The existing supply of ammunition could be exhausted a lot sooner than the guns themselves.

Will ammunition manufacturing be reduced? Over the dead bodies of the NRA. Of course, there are ample guns and bullets available to accomplish converting the NRA into dead bodies, but it would probably be considered, hmmmm, bad form, bad taste, impolite, politically incorrect, rude, etc., not to mention murder in the first degree.

Our gun problem is the result of poorly regulated or entirely unregulated capitalism; this is true for a lot of our problems, like global warming, pollution, pandemic obesity, poverty, etc. etc. etc. It's also a product of a right-wing political agenda which has been in operation for around... 40+ years. It's no accident that the NRA was taken over by right wingers and converted from a gun-safety to a gun-rights organization.

So should I or shouldn't I put up a website telling the world that my brother likes to sleep with 16-19 year old girls? If not, why not? — Tree Falls

You seem to be having a problem with "proportionate response". If you think you are morally obligated to inform the parents of the 14 year old that your brother might attempt to have sex with her, then do so. Putting up a web site describing your brother may lead to unforeseen and/or undesirable consequences over which you will have no control.

It's a family matter, not the whole world's concern. Keep it within the family.

BTW, how old are you? Straight or gay? Older or younger than your brother? Just wondering what your relationship with your brother is like, outside of this particular age of consent issue.

I'm perplexed, because I don't see the means by which we can undo decades of gun acquisitions by a good share of the population.

I am not, and never have been a gun ownership advocate or a 2nd Amendment enthusiast. I do now and have always loathed the NRA.

The conclusion of the JPHA article makes perfectly good sense:

Conclusions. We observed a robust correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.

Gun ownership is already very widely distributed; There are around 300,000,000 guns in the U.S. At least 100 million Americans own 1, 2, 3 or more guns. That cat is out of the bag. Homicides by firearms, however, are not distributed exactly the same way that gun ownership is. Take Illinois: Illinois is not among the 20 states with the highest level of murder by firearms. Parts of Chicago have few murders by gun. But some parts of Chicago have astonishingly high rates of murder by firearms.

Blue = lowest, red = highest rate of gun homicide. In 2017, 625 were shot and killed; 2936 were shot and wounded.



36% of Minnesota households own guns, but the state has one of the lowest rates of homicide. Illinois has a rate of 26% but one of the highest rates of homicide (again... Chicago).

↪Bitter Crank It’s more than ‘a policy failure’ - it’s a breakdown of civil order. — Wayfarer

There is a breakdown of civil order in some places, and various policies have contributed hugely to civil disorder. For instance, the inordinately high murder rate by gunfire in Chicago is in many of the neighborhoods most disadvantaged by an official public policy of racial segregation in housing, education, and unemployment beginning in the late 1940s. The ghettos and slums of Chicago didn't just happen -- civil disorder was created. Couple imposed disadvantages with powerlessness, insufficient and hostile police presence in poor neighborhoods, cheap guns, drugs, welfare dependence, lack of employment opportunity, etc. etc. and you have major problems.

I was agreeing with "deleted".

I agree completely.



Whoever decided that those three guys should go out on the runway looking like that should be taken away and not be heard of again.

Take China: if their economy does not grow at a high rate, it can not keep up with population growth, or even minimal aspirations for a better life for a few hundred million peasants who would like something better. Lagging growth means unemployment, poverty, severe social disappointment and consequently serious social upheaval. Revolution, maybe, and chaos.

Over the long run (like... from the collapse of Rome to the Renaissance -- something like that period of time) the world's economic growth rate was very, very low. There was not enough economic activity to generate much development of any kind.

It might be that saving the environment from terminal destruction will require severe curtailment of economic growth, but understand that braking hard will be a social calamity.

They seem only a bunch of closely-packed leaves, curiously unattached to any tree. — Ciceronianus the White

A hedge, perhaps, and not a tree.

but portraits are more about getting at something deeper about the person than mere physical resemblance. — Baden

What has been gotten at in the hideous portrait of HMQEII?

However. This image seems to be a little better. — charleton

The image you posted is better.

The gown (in the painting) is thought to be a nod to Milly's support of Planned Parenthood. — Cavacava

In what way???

Like a debutante on a skin-flick set facing her first moneyshot — Akanthinos

An inspired insight.

IF being in possession of a gun and ammunition was related to using the gun, then we would see far, far more gun violence than we do. There are a reported 200 million to over 300 million guns in America. The number of people killed in 2016 by homicide was 17,250. In 2013, the average homicide rate in the U.S. was 4.9 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to the average rate globally, which was 6.2.

17,250 murders per year (which excludes many suicides by gunfire) is in all respects a policy failure, but it may be the case ([i]I hate saying this[/i]) that it isn't the number of guns in American's possession that is the critical problem; it is the fact that we have no effective way of denying anybody a gun, should they wish to have one.

Worse, we have no really effective system in place to deny gun access to someone who is unstable and intent on committing mayhem. If the gun inventory was the same in the US as it is in European countries, limiting control wouldn't be a problem. But that is not the case. Our inventory is too large now to look after effectively.

Supposing "Tree Falls" was a professional who had a mandated duty-to-report child abuse, rape, plans for murder, etc. Would loyalty to family trump the law in this case? (Many people who have a duty-to-report make it a practice to caution anyone about to unload confidential or confessional information to be careful, because they are mandated reporters.)

1) What do you think the age of consent should be?
2) Do you think my brother's behavior is wrong?
3) Should our family friends be told about my brother?
4) If your answer to questions 2 and 3 are yes, what in general am I ethically obligated to do? I am thinking above and beyond notifying our friends. Should I create a website solely devoted to my brother's behavior and engage in SEO so that his name will be a top 10 hit if someone googles him? — Tree Falls

Some people will see a clear open and shut case: He's 40, he's obviously abusing young women. Report. Punish. Tell everybody.

I do not like that approach.

1, A child physically old enough to perform sexually should be given appropriate information about sex and sexuality. Providing appropriate education doesn't mean they are then fair game for everyone who might want to have sex with them. One of the things that could be damaging about having sex "too soon" is not having a mature and trusted person (beside the sex partner) with whom to process the experience.

2. Sex, in itself, is not a bad thing. It is coercion and psychological manipulation that create problems. For instance, using crude force to make someone have sex with you is wrong, and so is manipulating people into having sex by threatening them: "If you don't have sex with me, I will kill myself." "If you don't have sex with me I'll tell everyone that you are a slut."

I don't know why your brother prefers to have sex with 16 year olds. But then, I don't know why gentlemen prefer blonds, or why some people like cats better than dogs. Is he avoiding a mature relationship with a woman his own age for some reason? And if he is, what on earth could you possibly do about it?

Your parents know about your brother. What can you add to their knowledge?

Why don't you talk to your brother about this?

There is the magic, mystic crystal revelations of the New Age, and then there is just ordinary secular meditation. The neophyte in secular meditation is asked to sit, breathe, relax, and only observe what passes through the mind, as a passive observer. The practice is to let it flow, not interfering. Just observe. There should be no judgement or denial: only passive acceptance.

With practice, one can achieve a quiet meditative-type state: relaxed, calm, passive. The chatter of the brain gradually dies down; it doesn't usually go away.

One can add a mantra; a Christian meditator would probably adopt a prayer, or a liturgical passage, and simply repeat it literally, or think it. And so on.

I have not meditated beyond the quiet, relaxed, calm, passive observer state. But so far, I have experienced acceptance rather than denial. It isn't a primitive state, it's just a state that anyone can achieve with some practice, for whatever purpose they have in mind.

Achieving a mystical state, as in deep and prolonged meditation, is the practice of specialists.

I believe we have will, and I believe it is largely, but not entirely, free. A problem of our mind is that so much of it is inaccessible to the conscious mind, the facility of mind that we are most familiar with. Surrounding the conscious mind is the longer, wider, deeper, and higher unconscious mind where most of our mental processes are conducted.

It is in this unconscious, non-conscious mind where decisions are made, and passed on for the conscious mind to announce. Experiments have shown that in lab tests, decisions are reached "before we have made up our minds." That is, before we are consciously aware of what we are going to do in the lab set up, the unconscious mind has decided.

This subtracts nothing from who I am, or who you are. Whatever goes on in my subconscious, unconscious, non-conscious mind is ME. I don't exist just in the conscious mind.

I am sure, just based on experience, that I am not free to choose all options before me. I have learned some options are unacceptable and I am afraid of some options. (Like, will you jump off this very high diving board for $1000? No, never. It's not an option I am capable of considering.) Torture me with electric shocks and red hot pins under my finger nails. Will I confess what I have vowed never to reveal? Sure. I'm not superman.

Is some of our behavior determined by physics, chemistry, biology? I suppose it is. Given the prevalence of the right set of chemicals in my brain, I will be unable to maintain positive, upbeat thoughts, even though that is what I prefer. Can I talk myself into and out of a depressive state? I don't think I can will myself to feel depressed, if I don't feel that way. Neither can I talk myself into feeling just fine if I feel very anxious and depressed.

So, from my POV, we are left with a constrained free will over which our conscious mind does not exercise much, if any, control. Will does the controlling of the conscious mind, not the other way around. We can feed our minds information, it will make a more or less free choice. How it does that will probably be invisible to us. The invisibility doesn't mean it is all determined. It just means we can't see it happen.

good point about community. One robot would probably not wend its way through complex traffic; if all the robots were linked in a community, however, so that the robots knew what the other near-by robots were planning on doing next, traffic itself would become "intelligent".

You make a number of good points.

The biggest problem of AIs is that they will not be able to deliver on the promise. The second biggest problem (or the biggest, depending) is that AIs will eliminate jobs. Automation, efficiencies, robots, etc. have already eliminated a lot of jobs, and not just in manufacturing. Computers make it possible for fewer people to manage operations.

One solution to the unemployment problem is the Guaranteed Minimum Wage (GMW) which would supply an income to people displaced by automation, smart robots, AIs and so forth. Depending on their age and abilities, they could either retire early (in reduced circumstances) or they could retrain to do something else.

GMW isn't really all that radical an idea.

Is this a real issue? — Uneducated Pleb

Of course it is.

A lot of what people are calling "artificial intelligence" is just better programs operating with a lot more data. For instance, speech recognition is not the product of artificial intelligence--which is not to under-rate it. I think Google's speech-to-text service is excellent at times and is improving. But when you reach a computer on the phone, and when it asks you a question, and it says "Say 'yes' or 'no'" and you say "no" and it says, "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that; let's try again" and 10 tries later it still can't understand "yes" or "no", it's clear that one is dealing with a very stupid and very poorly engineered system.

I've done a fair amount of clerical work, and as far as I am concerned, this is stuff that computers should be doing. There are a lot of jobs that people do that will be eliminated in the next 20 years. Attaching RFID (radio Frequency ID) devices to objects sold in supermarkets eliminates the need for checkout. Readers can survey the chips in your bags, and charge you automatically. There's no artificial intelligence in that.

The autonomous automobile or truck either needs specially adapted superstructure (sensors, signals, data streams, etc.) to aid an on-board computer as it travels down the road, or it needs something a lot closer to (or actual) machine intelligence: A machine intelligence that can make sense of chaotic traffic and respond in real time, and make ethical decisions (according to prescribed rules), or both. My guess (my fear) is that the on-board systems, IF they are even better than Google's speech to text systems, will result in a lot of injured or dead people.

It is my belief (don't have file cabinets full of evidence) that instinct and genes do play a significant role in human behavior. Humans, however, have a lot of behavioral flexibility so it isn't always obvious that dysfunction is occurring, or why, or how.

For instance, rates of marriage and births outside of marriage have risen and are rising (at least among some strata). Over all birthrates in reasonably affluent strata are falling. Children's outcomes seem to suffer. Is this a dysfunction or a result of more freedom? I suspect it is a dysfunction, but I don't know precisely what to attribute as a cause. Fewer sanctions on out-of-wedlock births plays a role, but why are there fewer sanctions?

Fathers don't often kill the offspring of previously fathered children in a new relationship, but men do abandon children fairly often. Is this instinct or a social dysfunction? Infanticide is a not-altogether uncommon respond to social pressures: the desire for male offspring (thinking of India, here). This strikes me as a dysfunction in response to rigid social norms (boy babies are better).

On the matter of crowding: What is "too crowded" for humans? One can keep adding rats to the cage until one starts to see dysfunction appear. People keep adding themselves to cities, yet dysfunction doesn't seem to appear--very dramatically, at least. People actively seek out short term periods of overcrowding--who wants to spend an evening looking for sex in a bar that is practically empty? Deadly. Much better to have crowding -- but not too much. There is an optimal level of crowding that provides just the right number of potential candidates who will concur that you and he are a good match, and a fine time will be had. Based on my experiences in gay bars, I'd say "ideal" is well under the maximum capacity of the joint. If max is 300, then maybe 150 to 200 is ideal.

One of the problems in talking about the density of cities, is that starting in the 1800s, horse-drawn street cars and reasonably good strategically placed roads (and later electric street cars and autos), made it possible to engineer reduced density. It isn't that density was an enemy to be conquered. It was that a city full of people was a large market for suburban housing, located, positioned, and built to attract affluent urban dwellers. Fine housing could have been built in the city, but it was much, much more profitable to build it in the unoccupied farm lands next to the city. This kind of engineering is also typical human behavior.

If I remember correctly, one of the things that some rats do in over-crowded settings is withdraw and isolate. They burrow into the bedding and avoid the rat-crowds. I sympathize with the isolating rats. I like bouts of social activity, but after too much exposure, I want to burrow into the bedding on the floor of my cage and avoid my fellow rat-beings for a while, like a couple of days or longer.

Premier Parisien: "Le peuple se révolte!"
Second Parisien: "Oui, ils le sont certainement."

First Parisian: "The people are revolting!"
Second Parisian: "Yes, they certainly are."

I like the pose. I loathe the light blue background. I don't like the the artist's coloring of the First Lady -- it's too grayish, and the execution of the face doesn't convey Michele Obama's mature attractiveness. The dress takes up way too much space.

The President's portrait had different problems -- the green ivy background was a bit overwhelming, as opposed to the underwhelming blue of Michele's portrait. The likeness of Barack was good, however. In both cases, I would prefer to have the subject's figures take up a larger share of the portrait surface.

I don't like J. Kennedy's portrait either.

The Obama portraits may be official, but time and other portraits will determine what image the public likes better.

It could be worse, I suppose. The now-preferred image of George Washington was left unfinished.

understanding astrophysical theory is above my pay grade, let alone finding holes in it.

if there are alternative theories I don't mind. — TheMadFool

Are you familiar with the steady state theory (Fred Hoyle)?

But the reason I say it's anti-philosophical, is because, if materialism is true, then there's no wisdom (sophia) to be had. We are simply a species of animal, that makes patterns of sounds, that create an illusion of meaning, for the brief moment of a meaningless existence. — Wayfarer

Did wisdom come through and within human thought or did it come from outside human thought? Aren't we the authors of such wisdom as we know?

So, you wouldn't have agreed with Francis Crick, when he said that '“You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.' (where 'no more' is pretty well an exact synonym for 'mere')? — Wayfarer

Once upon a time we didn't know anything about nerve cells and their associated molecules. We knew what we felt, our joys and our sorrows, and we knew who we were. Discovering the mechanisms for sensation, memory, thinking, emotion and so forth (stuff that goes on in and between neurons in the brain) doesn't change who we are or what we feel.

I don't know why Crick, or anybody else, takes the view that we are "no more than" the mechanism.

All sorts of mechanisms are operating when we make or hear music. Music moves us even though we know that music is transmitted by vibrating air produced on various mechanisms. That there is a mechanism doesn't reduce the value of music, does it? We know how pipe organs work; there is a lot of mechanism stuffed into the organ loft. All the electronic and mechanical mechanism doesn't reduce the glory of a great organ, it just makes it possible.

Some confuse the chemical messenger with the message. Parents don't adore their newborn baby because oxytocin is emitted; oxytocin is emitted to carry love. Sure, oxytocin has an effect when sprung on an unsuspecting person in a lab, but the result is temporary.

Just because a passing ship has photographed far distant Pluto, and just because another ship either has left the solar system, or will soon, just because explorers are rolling around Mars, doesn't turn space into some sort of heaven. Mars hasn't recently been the God of War, and Jove hasn't been the big cheese in the pantheon of Gods since... a couple thousand year, give or take a century or two.

Maybe something mysterious is lost when knowledge of the cosmos is gained, but it isn't as if the hard-won knowledge about the cosmos cheapens it. The same for the hard-won (and still incomplete) knowledge about the brain doesn't make the mind just a big calculator that can be taken apart and revealed to be a box of levers, wheels, nuts, bolts, and springs.

it tends to dissolve the imagination into the doings of neurons, genes, endocrines, enzymes, and so on. It is deliberately deflationary to the imagination. — Wayfarer

I don't find that to be the case. Neurons, genes, endocrine glands, enzymes, neurotransmitters, synaptic gaps, the limbic system, pre-frontal cortexes -- on and on -- All play a role. But neurotransmitters are a means to an end, not the end. Even though neurotransmitters operate in synaptic gaps, and neurons operate both chemically and electrically, and even though genes direct the activities of all this stuff, it is still YOU that have experiences, imagine, compose, write, philosophize, not the glands and synapses. If you are surprised by a snake or a big spider in an unexpected place, you feel (I sure do, anyway) a a shiver of fear. Sure, it's a chemical -- adrenaline -- that causes the shiver, but it's a real snake, a real big spider, and my very real fear.

but there seems to be a difference not only in degree but in type as to how human personalities are constructed from linguistic-conceptual cues combined with genetic predispositions. — schopenhauer1

Don't forget experience -- another factor in us being who we individually are.

Andromeda is just doing the Local Motion (as in, C'mon baby, do the locomotion -- see below).

Galaxies do collide every now and then, but it won't be a cataclysmic event. The stars in galaxies are a long ways apart from each other. Think of two large groups of people colliding head on where each person is 600 feet from each other person. It's possible that the two groups could pass through each other without any collisions at all.

The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are both spinning (slowly) so they will mix into each other, slowly, and then they will continue on as before, probably moving away from everything else till hell freezes over.

I haven't decided what to do with the black holes in the two galactic centers. What do you think? Should we have them merge?. I haven't decided on what to do with the big hump in the middle of Andromeda, either. Any suggestions?

Meanwhile, let's all do the locomotion.

Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance — Henri Bergson

Of course, which road leads to knowledge and which road leads to the veils of ignorance isn't agreed upon. And never mind the road, we aren't agreed on the destinations, either. One road goes this way, the other road goes that way. Where do they end?

the merely biological — Wayfarer

Life arising from the mud and persisting? Cyanobacterias still going strong after 2.8 billion years; the chambered nautilus, 500 million years old. Sturgeon, 200 million years old. We, derived from fish, discussing our evolution. Merely biological? Much more than mere.

"Nothing is mere."

How I'm rushing through this! How much each sentence in this brief story contains. "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth. I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on.Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is mere.

I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
― Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics

I wonder how it will be turn out? — Rich

Actually, we already know how it is turning out: Not good.

But that's what I mean by tech, bio, and mens don't always jive: We can figure out how to suck up oil from deep below the surface of the earth and convert it into plastics and fuel. That's a highly centralized function. But then the plastic is distributed to every corner of human life, with no centralized method (anywhere) to collect and reuse it -- or at least sequester it. It ends up everywhere from the deepest oceanic trenches to the highest mountains. CO2 is the same thing, of course.

There are roughy 500,000,000 people living in North America, consuming -- and excreting -- all sorts of pharmaceuticals from aspirin to cancer medications, and all these excreted chemicals (and more besides) are ending up in the water (even the air).

We don't seem to be able to think through the problem of centralized production (chemical plants) and atomized distribution (billions of people using drugs and indestructible plastics).

I guess I'm engaging in this thread at all because I actually want to ask "why are we fragile?" and "why is nature rough?" I'm having a toddler moment. I'm not satisfied with these placations and admonishments about how "shit happens", etc. — Noble Dust

Much of individual life is 'fragile'. Toughness and resistance to nature's roughness is found in groups more than individuals. It isn't just us. Everybody in the animal kingdom can't be the top-predator, can't be extremely resistant to being eaten, can't be impervious to every run-of-the-mill threat that comes along. We may be strong and really tough, but some little virus comes along and cuts us off at the knees. All of us species have survived because we reproduced abundantly enough to keep ourselves in business over the hundreds of millions of years we have been around, in one form or another.

Monarch butterflies can't be at once light, beautiful, and strong enough to migrate many hundreds of miles YET be armored enough to not be eaten.

Some people think we are "no longer animals". We transcended all of that stuff by becoming very smart, and having language, and philosophy, and all that stuff. We certainly are an odd animal in our specialization.

Agreed. But that relates to the issue of autonomy/development. When we create our own suffering, are we doing it because of developmental lack, or does everyone do it, no matter how "developed" they are? What the fuck does it mean to be "developed"? — Noble Dust

We are indisputably animals, and "no longer animals as such". The rock bottom core of our "human problem" is that we are animals who imagine that we have transcended our animal nature. Tech, bio, and mens don't always jive. Most of us spend at least some of our time in a fantasy world. I'm not knocking it--it's a necessary retreat from life-as-we-know-it. But then, in the middle of our happy fantasy, we get rudely jerked back into reality.

It's such a pain in the neck.

...with the practical effect that humans are no longer animals as such. Whilst biologically their kinship with animals can’t be disputed, it is just the ability to think and speak which differentiates humans from animals. — Wayfarer

I will grant that it is difficult to feel like an animal as I sit here in cold Minnesota in front of a computer screen made in China communicating with people on 3 different continents, while I drink coffee raised somewhere in Africa or South America and roasted in Seattle, WA, and stay warm in a bathrobe made in Portugal. The little heater that is keeping more of the chill away is running on electricity from a mix of nuclear, coal, and wind power.

We are indisputably animals, and "no longer animals as such". The rock bottom core of our "human problem" is that we are animals who imagine that we have transcended our animal nature. Tech, bio, and mens don't always jive.