Find the easiest way to do the hardest part.

Excellent example. A portion of the population, that might otherwise thrive, being disenfranchised due to societal fears. Yet it won't stay buried. It surfaces as an indicator, a warning.

You do hear said that the black sheep in a family maybe symptomatic of dysfunction in a family but this person is channelling it or displaying it whilst others are in denial. — Andrew4Handel

The lava will get to the surface, it will just take the path of least resistance. Which is our black sheep. Is he then playing a necessary role in society? To purge our dysfunction, to make it manifest.

Any illness relies on a notion of malfunction it seems. — Andrew4Handel

Good point.

Maybe the OP is looking at the body's (or society's) activity of maintaining homeostasis. Does mental pain serve society to balance / counteract something? To what end?

It has been said that mental problems are a result of our susceptibility to such problems and societal oppression. Whether or not society is dysfunctional, it certainly demands compliance without review. Not all will flourish who could otherwise.

Also saying something is 'wrong' is presuming metaphysics is it not?

The Schopenhauer card says: you can't win anyway and you would't be satisfied if you did.

The Water Hydra is a little creeper that seemingly doesn't age at all. It's stem cell can apparently self-rejuvenate as needed without the cap to division that apparently affect almost all other cellular life. — Akanthinos

So what exactly, are it's limits?

finite life-span — TheMadFool

It would seem that everything has a finite life span, a temporal state of affairs. Would evolution or creative evolution (Bergson) make sense if permanence or unending growth were the case? A transition from non-living material to living does not cancel entropy, or a global homeostasis. Death is a necessary condition of procession.

Krishnamurti said something like "it's not the unknown that that we are scared of , it's the end of the known". Conspiracy theories give a good jerk to the rug beneath our feet.

I don’t think it has been demonstrated in any modern society that people can provide equality to the satisfaction of those who feel affected by its absence. We certainly can’t legislate it. It is hopefully our goal, but the causes remain far upstream.

Since this is in the political philosophy section we might first ask, what kind, and to what extent, can we provide equality for anyone or anything? If what causes of these differences is beyond the scope of the discussion then I don’t see how that can be.

Outlines of Philosophy by Will Durant

Maybe the only reason we are looking back in the first place is because of meliorism. We know we'll see technological progress but does anything really get any better?

Hell of a good thread so far.

We all do it. Examining the criteria (however badly) for our chosen frame of reference. Everything follows from that. We are all philosophers. Making it esoteric adds nothing.

In those groups where growth is the highest, I believe the primary motivation to have children is still economic survival. If no government will take care of them in old age then their children will. That is a difficult mindset to regulate or reverse.

It would be hard to defend the practice of philosophy without a demonstration of its practical effects. It can only be to improve our decision making in life on the things that will not reliably distill to a mathematical model we can abduce. Making choices is a constant activity that must aim at what will most likely include an improvement on another option, and avoid the apparent error of the past. Philosophy is the daily reappraisal and reassessment of the criteria that informs our choices.

There is also the position that we are all philosophers. If philosophy is the daily reappraisal and reassessment of the criteria that informs our choices then any person with a world view is a philosopher, no matter how informed or considered it is. Much like voting, if you shut your eyes and pull a lever, or don’t vote at all, you are still impacting the final outcome.

I find this approach to be very satisfying. Philosophy is an immutable inexorable, necessary process of life, no matter its quality. It can’t be dismissed as an abstraction, or esoteric, or something that requires completion / conclusion. And thus, neither can I.

Aren't you passing the buck? " no one is obliged to answer" is right. And what sort of answer would be sufficient? Who do you want to validate the reason why?

He's got the codes.

I've seen a lot of wedding photography that included candid, unstaged shots but, yes, there is always the requisite group shots. The reason probably has to do with social bonding and evidence of shared experience. But the "look like they are going to be shot" to me is that this going to be irrefutable evidence of what you really look like and we pose to try and control the narrative of the photograph.

Look before you leap.
vs
He who hesitates is lost

What is the cost-benefit of thermal depolymerization? How much energy input (heat and pressure) does it take to get so much energy output? — Bitter Crank

The beauty of the process is that it takes the waste products that we are drowning in and breaks them down into their base ingredients. The system has been shown to operate entirely on the natural gas it extracts from the waste materials. Other by-products are metals, light and heavy oils, fertilizers, etc. We simply need to feed it our waste. I cannot show that it will solve all of the oil problem but I am confident we will see the process as a major player in the transition.

Thermal depolymerization holds a great deal of promise and is already up and running. But whatever technological advances come the final instance of life with oil and life without will never come. What will come is an agonizing reappraisal of who or what wakes up with all the chips when we start doing things a different way. I suspect that is your point.

September 12

human progress is convergent. — Cavacava

I thought there may be a Hegelian in our midst. I thought it my duty to announce my suspicions.

I'm sorry, but I wasn't sure which comment or question you were responding to. Human progress converges on the resolution of...? Or true knowledge of....?

Converging on what?

That it can't be trusted or verified would seem to be a condition of the fact (?) that we are metrical and the world is non-metrical. We project a unitized overlay on the world, count the units in pro and con, and make a decision. How we identify and count those units is prone to error and ignorance but it earns the badge of rationality anyway. But trying to keep up with science is trying to keep up with the Jones's. I find it depressing.

Yes an interesting interview and many here agree with him. But doesn't it change things if we consider everyone a philosopher? That anyone with a world view is making philosophical decisions every day and participating whether they think about it or not. I think Gramsci and others have said this. If all humans are philosophers then the realization that we are running on a hamster wheel is hardly surprising. We philosophize because it's an activity that informs our operating system to make decisions. And decisions are necessary.

Doxastic voluntarism I should say.

It comes to volunteerism doesn't it?

who knows? "..from little acorns grow.."

My friend Mig and her dog Tig are trying to stick with the arc of this conversation.

all weapons act as a deterrent. — Benkei

I'm not sure about that.

The last war that anyone in the United States could have been satisfied with was the first Gulf War. Our tanks, rifles, and uniforms against theirs. Big open country, similar technology, little collateral damage to address, in and out quick, all provided a rare clarity of what and how we were doing.
This seems to be the only way we know of to fight a "winnable war" and we haven't seen it since. We may never see it again. We have driven around Iraq and Afghanistan with million dollar convoys waiting to be blown up by improvised explosive devices by a generation whose parents made their living with a hoe. People who didn't know how to land planes flew them into our buildings.

If I wanted to actually defeat a greater power I would not run around trying to enrich plutonium, I would wait for the inevitable reveal of vulnerability and get the IED of the moment.

When I try to drag a photo into the post box I get a box that says " You don't have permission to upload files"

This is of course another thread, but I'd like to see how you're defining "polite society"

All this casts representative democracy in a poor light. We continually vote on issues we have no real hope of understanding and synthesising, to support politicians who want to control understanding and synthesising for other aims.
Perhaps a thread on the ramifications of 100% voter turnout.

Did Freud say anything to suggest that dreaming has an involuntary regulatory function for the mind analogous to the body sweating to regulate temperature? I've never really understood this. Does the physicalist reject any mental sovereignty? Does the idealist consider temperature regulation to be a concept?

I guess what I'm getting at is, are dreams just epiphenomenal clouds that we only consciously see a face or a story in or is there a process / mechanism that is trying to regulate your mental temperature? Who is this "brain" that is re-calibrating the neural carriages of emotional energy during sleep?