Dennett'sho (Dawken'sho)

You say potato, I say potato.

What do you call an ensho that copies itself by a praxis?

Do you mean that I've ruined the thread because my jokes are actually funny? — T Clark

Hey! Calm down, I'm joking.

Your jokes were great. I only wish mine were as good as yours.

I think we should blame T Clark for ruining this thread.

Just remember I didn't do anything wrong. I'm totally innocent. You all participated against the wills of the better angles of your nature. T Clark should be banned not me.

I hope you're thinking what I am thinking.

Knock knock! — praxis

Who's there?

If someone knocks on a door and nobody's home can the knocker hear himself knocking?

I challenge you to demonstrate the claim that my jokes don't make sense. I accept they aren't funny or don't make you laugh or are not jokes but not that they do not make sense.

If something doesn't make sense then how can we sense it?

A man walking next to the Bedlam and Son's Open Source Asylum for Cognitive Surfeit hears another man shout down to him from a top a wall.

"Hey! Are there many of you in there?"

The man shouts back:

"No! I am one of a kind."

Don't ruin my illusion. I was imagining they are deeply meaningful comments on the absurdity of existence. — T Clark

You are continually trapped in a repurposing of my references Sir. I meant venereal diseases by "they" and "they" are not illusions, unless your ontological schema treats of phenomenal reality as an illusion.

A strange proposition to be sure: venereal diseases are actually meaningful comments on the absurdity of existence.

So far, your jokes have left me scratching my head. — T Clark

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Itching of the head is a common symptom of a venereal disease. Is there any swelling or discharge? One too many times with Sophia, eh?

They are pretty bad, I agree.

Wine and blood (redness), part of the Dionysian inventory, convey the violence of necessary facts of life, consuming what releases you momentarily from want, the spirit we can't stop.

My current mythic play image is the blue tetrahedron which eats people in order to get work done, just like the hateful pressure washer that my boss makes me use. It eats up my patience. It is blood hungry, wants me to caress it for its evil (non) purposes. Men are bottles of wine to it. I feed it grapes as a means to someone elses end. Smash it to pieces I say.

Also, why gender non-gendered objects anyways? That seems like an odd way to relate to the world. I don't even get why non-scientific societies would think in those terms. Language does not have to have gendered words, but some do, and it became the convention. So odd. — Schopenhauer1

It's not odd at all. It's as odd as metaphor or analogy which becomes standardized (all too familiar).

What is hot (trending) right now?

Damn, you folks are embarrassingly brilliant (intelligent) and light on your feet (gracefully quick).

The Mother is the ground from which men emerge.

My father is my mother.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a banana is just a banana.

A duck's vagina is a twisted labyrinth of dead ends.

Are all labyrinths then secretly contextualized by a duck's vagina? Who told me that a duck's vagina is like a labyrinth? Who told me what a labyrinth is like?

Who or what is impregnating me with meanings?

No thing is like anything else, except where we cherry pick our likenesses, for some aim. Language is full of historical accidents and arbitrary uses probably.

We do what works. But does it work for you?

Does the basket hold your berries?

Does an Iphone hold, store or contain your pictures?

Werner Heisenberg was speeding in Death Valley when a car pulls up to match his velocity and rolls down a window. The driver yells "Excuse me sir, I seem to be moving. Also, do you know where I am going to stop?" Heisenberg says "How the hell can I predict where you are going to stop, asshole, what kind of question is that."

Botlzmann's Dog probably killed Schrodinger's Cat but no one could be absolutely sure even after they opened the box which Billy had mischievously stuffed them into.

The most intimate nouns are gendered. Man has a penis. Woman has a vagina. These things become analogical/metaphorical scheme by which we try to apprehend the world.

Folks still gender objects in terms of stereotyped or personal associations.

If we are sorting guns and flowers into gendered categories, where do we put them?

Raw categorizing in terms of belonging to male or female is expected.

Objectness is a set of syntactical accidents that precede essence. Essence (re)adapts syntactical precedence toward a simulated objectness. Functionalities are collapsed into the signifiers as comfortably known and knowable essences of an ontological terroir.

There is no subjectness where subjectivity appears. Subjectness is trapped in the eternal recursion of its own appearances as temporal escapes of relief and delight.

Whereof one cannot understand, one should shut up and serve coffee to those who can understand.

Whereof one can understand, one doesn't deserve to to have any coffee. Though you cannot derive ought(s) from is(s) concerning who should get any coffee.

Someone asks Wittgenstein about the aim of his philosophy.

He laughs and says : 'To show the fly the way out of its fly bottle.'

Someone asks Spider about the aim of his philosophy.

He eyes a fly and gesticulates : 'To weave webs.'

Someone asks Bottle about the aim of its philosophy.

It buzzes with the sound of a fly: "Buzzzz buzzz"

"Philosophy is dead. "

A joke by Stephen Hawking.

Obviously, "what is dead may never die."

'Consciousness is an illusion.'

A joke (with props) by Daniel Dennett.

We're here to negligibly increase the rate of entropy.
This is not a joke.

Whenever someone brings up the idea of questioning whether existence itself should be continued for future people, a common response is that it is a juvenile topic. — schopenhauer1

Juvenile in the sense of a tyrant who holds to the power to destroy folks in genocidal acts of war or commit political blunders with grave consequences?

The first sentence in your OP evoked other tough adult problems: tragedy of the commons (ex.climate change and antibiotic resistance) and abortion. These problems tend to make adults resemble juveniles (ie. selfish) from an ideal point of view and solution..

You're permitted to dismiss anything at any time. You can't be forced to do anything you don't want to.

Boys tend to be more naturally game oriented and build a hierarchy from coordinating in a larger group than girls.

Ribbing (endless teasing, after puberty) is there to continually mediate and check status of others.

Testosterone contextually mediates for status in a group setting, an amplifier of context specific behavior (like ribbing). It can make males who are prone aggression more aggressive but it can also attenuate aggression as a means of maintaining or attaining individual status in a group hierarchy.

Imagine a philosophy forum stripped of its testicles. I can't.

What is the ratio of male responses to female ones in this forum? Secret curious statistic...

I'm spent and resigned but my body still breathes for me.

I'm inspired by the anxious promise and fears (the apprehension) of degradation, poverty, illness, alienation and just hell generally. (I guess this isn't precisely inspiring since it requires a 'pure state devoid of resentment or jealousy.')

Mythopoetic drama, narratives and the visual arts are inspiring!

Cosmic horror or zen tranquility as the decorative overlay. (Sur)real des(s)erts, for(rests) and v(o)ids. Bosch's final panel in triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights .

A bad metaphor is Lamarchand's puzzle box or the Crimson Behelit or a personal transport vehicle. Everyone is wearing a Behelit, or manipulating a black box, or an artifact (vehicle) that consumes or channels a spirit (energy) toward a distant heat death (expiration). Stuff comes out of the box (like heat, and karmic output/input, and more object(ive) ordering means at trade off by a missing cost-benefit analysis) and folks deal with it as they do. It is what it is.

HP Lovecraft has nothing on Daniel Dennett's Neo Darwininan steam punk cyber memetic automata world building from undead twirly macro molecules story. Oh the memetic horror! of substrate neutral evolution by (mindless) natural selection.

One could discuss the probability of self-replicators in Conway's Game of Life with more certainty (or not...).

How many random starting configurations does it take to get this self-replicating machine (or a Universal Constructor)? Or is this something that necessarily requires an intelligent designer?

Sure, but you realise that this doesn't solve much of the problem. — Agustino

I'm not sure what the problem is exactly. Maybe someone could state it in a single sentence for us cognitive plebeians. Intelligent design just gives us an infinite regress.

The chaos and order scheme hasn't been addressed or worked out at all. No one knows what this means.

Folks are talking about improbability of life but what are these claims or speculations really grounded in (Fermi Paradox?).

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/

Apokrisis has been going around saying our impulse to order here is to dissipate heat, to increase entropy. At the molecular level, under certain stable conditions (an energy source, heat bath) matter orders itself to dissipate more energy and this puts the upward trend of evolution of matter into motion.

How much heat are you dissipating?

It brings new meaning to the saying: If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Don't scatter pearls before swine.

Adorn your pigs with pearls and lipstick and take them to the fair.

Trade your pigs for pearls.

Throw a Luau.

Bugger the neighbors pigs while wearing your pearls.

Hunt feral boar in the hills.

Pull the trigger bro. Punch a Draconic Metaphor much? It ain't like punching Nazis. Bruce Lee has nothing on me.

I'm the great metaphorical Dragon that has eaten your father and is hoarding the Golden Girls.

If you would die for Sophia, come and defeat me. I also accept gifts, wagers, exchanges, and pawns if the conditions are to my taste. If you need a pay day loan I can do that also.

For only $29.90, my Self-Authoring Program will help you to plan for a better life. Statistics show how effective it is. If you don't know where you are, how will you be able to plan where you want to go?

Come at me bro. You know you want my gold and girls and truth and power and fusion core. Everything has its price.

Will comes from within, from inside, and one is always in full control of it. Desires come from without, from outside, and one is not necessarily in control of that. — Samuel Lacrampe

Given that will is about the deliberation (thinking) in concert with desire, those desires figure in to purposeful (and automatic) striving and partially determine what choices one makes, one therefore cannot be in full control of will. Willing deals with motivating factors of which we are not in full control of and at times wish we could be free of. If we are not fully in control of our desires (if we can't inhibit or delay an impulse) then we can't fully be in control of our will.

The instinctual impulse to act in a lock and key fashion developed in evolutionary history long before the module of the neo cortex which functions to inhibit or delay behavior on the basis of reason and preferred future states. The functional power of a neo cortex varies greatly on the basis of a multitude of environmental and inheritable factors by which it develops.

I think you're presenting a prescriptive view. We ought to view (treat) will or intention as something we are fully responsible for(?).

Philosophers dispel and disenchant one second and then they conjure and reenchant the next. Just read a few threads to glean the absurdity that magic isn't anything like what philosophers do, as if philosophy or just being alive has nothing to do with art and the temporary satisfaction of desire.

There is a good Isabella Allende tale where a woman attains power and status by words. From the perspective of the dying culture (the supernaturalism of the displaced native) magic is just a label for what the art of her words accomplish. There is some power retained seeing the new world through the frames of the old one.

One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering. 'Supernatural' is a null word. — Robert Heinlein

Maybe I just like the literary genre of "magical realism" too much though.

If one is forced to do something without their consent, it is called "against their will"; and it is a self-contradiction to say "Their will is changed against their will". — Samuel Lacrampe

The last quoted sentence does make sense in a way because the physical underpinning of whatever is willed at any moment changes. Desires change based on changing circumstance, which may well be against our previous will. There are also competing desires within a person. If you control your will well then it is less likely to change against your will. There are competing wills within a person.

Whatever I will is not what I will because my will arises against me, tortures me. My will makes me suffer as much as it helps to attenuate that suffering.

Going to work everyday is done against my will, but I will myself to work anyway. My present willingness is often changed against my immediately past willingness by ever shifting desires and environmental circumstance.

Unless willing is synonymous with action and less to do what we think we want or intend for a future state.

If this doesn't make sense just ignore me.

we have absolute power over our intentions — Samuel Lacrampe

This is a suspicious claim, unless your saying it is necessary or good to believe it. What is the implication of having absolute power over intention as opposed to conditional power or partial control over our intentions. It's like saying we have absolute power over our will (?).

Now synthesize from Huygens wave theory and Maslow's hiearchy of needs the newly preferred abstract metaprosthetic.

Huygen and Maslow's wave theory of needful boundary breaching.

Don't tell Hanover. He'll unbuckle his belt and start swinging disappointment like the conservative father you never had.

How does one go from being on disability in America to living in some Scandinavian country without dual citizenship? The hurdles for the Scandinavian option are so much more arduous than those in the home country, right? I've the impression that no country really wants to let anyone in who isn't categorically special, useful or rich.

It's about the resentment that folks have for an unfair distribution of traits. The ridiculously good looking are the same as the ridiculously ugly in terms of not having earned their lot (whatever that means). There is the possibility that no lots are really earned as much as casually determined unfoldings of preceding conditions.

See Ressentiment

Nihilism is an outgrowth of ressentiment, which is has its roots in displacement aggression.

There is an anecdote I heard on the radio about the chimp who ripped the face off his keeper. His keeper was giving another chimp cake and this threw him into a violent rage, either from jealousy or envy. Maybe that is like a man's wife having intercourse with another man in front of him.

Imagine a ridiculously beautiful face eating an ridiculously expensive cake on ridiculously cool plates, in a ridiculously fancy house, among ridiculously intelligent friends. We might as well be watching a television commercial. It must be a failure on my part as a human being but seeing such a spectacle makes me bitter, angry and resentful. I'm forever being reminded what I am not and what I don't have that is preferable to what I am and what I do have. I must be part chimp.

Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know? — Notes from The Underground, F. Dostoevsky

"Your suns and worlds are not within my ken,
I merely watch the plaguey state of men.
The little god of earth remains the same queer sprite
As on the first day, or in primal light.
His life would be less difficult, poor thing,
Without your gift of heavenly glimmering;
He calls it Reason, using light celestial
Just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.
To me he seems, with deference to Your Grace,
One of those crickets, jumping round the place,
Who takes his flying leaps, with legs so long,
Then falls to grass and chants the same old song;
But, not content with grasses to repose in,
This one will hunt for muck to stick his nose in.” — Faust by Goethe

Suppose we believe that being alive is good in most circumstances.

As it goes with natural selection, there are very few ways of being alive than there are ways of being dead.

The same maybe true of being good (ie. there are fewer ways of being good than bad) but what is good is relative to the needs and wants of those who benefit from goodness. Again, what is good? Says who?

Are planets with life on them better than planets with no life on them?
Is it good that we exist at all?
Is it good that I don't have malaria (do you care)? Parasites will eat.


This is just like Borges library of unintelligible books (a library of all possible random combinations of letters in an arbitrary format). There are more books in that library than there are atoms in the entire universe (this is mindblowing). Such quantities make finding intelligible books vanishingly small. Good books are intelligible books but they might as well not exist the way the library is organized (randomly).

Maybe sometimes what is "good" is achieved by a collective lie. The good is relative to subjective and communal perspectives.

It is good that the USD value of my bank account is currently real (or effective) in terms of what I can buy, despite the fact that the processes that conserve (and erode) it's purchasing power may be violent and exploitative from a certain point of view. What if the value of my bank account depended upon a bunch of insane and globally immoral expectations?

I will conserve myself at the expense of others. We will cooperatively conserve ourselves at the expense of others.

Lying is a means to achieve certain ends, just as pursuing delusion (fantasy) and conspicuous consumption is a means to anesthetize and distract ourselves from the angst and absurdity of life.

Emile Bin's Hamadryad

***

Hans Rudi Giger's art amplifies disgust and terror of technology as a projected onto the natural world. Might as well be a riff on the theme in Bin's Hamadryad.

Praxis' testosterone went down when he lost the status conferred by having the accepted answer. Now he is seeking to displace his aggression to recoup the loss.

He is on his way to kill Alyona Ivanovna, that rent seeking wallstreet bitch. Good riddance... but maybe we should ring the police to save us the nightmare that is a Dostoevsky length novel.