Could that be paraphrased as "take the bloody game seriously or piss off"? — Sir2u

A bit harsh. No one knows what it means to "take the game seriously" since the rules won't stick.

So we have a strange paradoxical thing on our hands: a non-game game free for all.

A better question would be, who has the total lack of morality needed to deny the creation of the game by not participating? — Sir2u

It's a double-bind now. You can't not play, even though in spirit no one ought to be forced to play (says some wannabe optional rule). To opt out is to opt in.

As Pauly Sartre said, 'We're condemned to play the game.' C'est la vie

Seventeen persons have lost their life because of the failed emergence (and utility) of this game.

You maybe thinking this is absurd and impossible. It is. The people are not real but imaginary.

They died in an imaginary flash flood, possibly due to imaginary climate change.

Supposedly, if you follow the rules, ideally, less imaginary people will die.

But how will you save those yet to die because of the failure of this non-game. How could a failed game cause such pretend devastation? How does one establish the failed game as a cause of these imaginary death?

By pretending that the effect is real and searching for the mechanism by which a failure to help the game emerge takes lives (lives that ought to have been saved).

The secret to giving the game life is to inspire the will to create it. But who has the will and strength to collaborate? Who has the passion?

In short, is the tit-for-tat strategy moral/immoral? — TheMadFool

Is it any more useful to get specific about the tit-for-tat in question.

Folks drink ground water laced with hexavalent chromium for years from a leeching local chemical plant and suffer all kinds of health consequences unknowingly.

Class action lawsuit forms to explicate cause and effect in a court of law and obtain monetary compensation for harm done.

A true tit-for-tat might require that we force all those guilty (responsible) to drink a certain quantity of hexavalent chromium for a time. Folks would say this is immoral. Why? Because we do not want to perpetuate harm in an endless cycle that brings down everyone and undermines the institution of law and order (society), which imposes itself between our natural response of justice (an eye for an eye). But there are probably lots of cases in which a tit-for-tat response is moral, depending on how contextually strict you are with whatever tit-for-tat means, and how innocent the reprisal is.

It reminds me of Rene Girard's crazy theory of what enabled culture to begin in the first place, by using a religious scapegoat (magic) to absorb and diffuse the apocalyptic escalation of tit-for-tat violence. It kept us stable enough to bring in a formal process of justice. Though if you look at some of those jungle hunter gatherer cultures the bad juju of tit-for-tat black magic accusation is alive and well in a terrifying way. Thus begins the chain reaction of an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye... until we're all blind. Hopefully the scapegoat or scapeplant can't retaliate...

___

We charge Yew (pun), to be guilty of murder, for poisoning the children of the community with your sweet poison seeds. For every man, woman and child poisoned by Yew so in turn a Yew should be poisoned.

Yew are sentenced to death by our poison. God bless.

No man steps in the same shit twice. But a person stepping in any shit again is probably inevitable.

Haha! Another dreamy thread which means it allows for a bad haphazard take.

The whole human shit show is absolutely reducible to tit for tat (or reciprocity variants). Treat others the way you think you ought to be treated. Live by fire, die by fire. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Plants are innocent because of their relative weaknesses (or strengths). It stems (pun) from the fact that they are immobile and slow, thus evadible. They don't stalk (pun) you. The worst of it comes by bicycling into cactus or hogweed or ingesting their poison, or losing a prized sheep to a brambles trap. The accidents are comparable to drowning or falling off a cliff, attributable to human error.

It is other minds that have done us wrong we would take revenge against in this endless saga. Even animals, by comparison to man, are innocent/amoral.

If you feel guilty for eating plants then the source of that guilt is misplaced or fanciful. You should feel guilty for eating plants because of the human labor of the harvest and what that kind of tit for tat (or causes and effects) that might entail.

It's too late, Mad. You should have installed antiphilosophy software before you got the bug.

You could try an antismoking script but then again what would life be like for a caffeine addict who has to voluntarily avoid it? Terrible.

This is why it is so hard for life to self-assemble into novels and metaphysics. No cooperation. No cooperation at all.

Now if your life depended upon following the rules and your nociceptors were wired into this game, such that everyone had some skin in it, maybe you'd all show Banno a bit more respect. Or go absolutely mad.

All rules shall compete for the power to enact and expedite themselves.

The great thing about death is that such an exit is always available. It's the consolation for the living (those suffering) that there is always an escape. But we should honor those we brought into the world, or those that brought us into the world, insofar we are obliged to live for them.

Maybe we need a cultural revolution around death, that makes it less scary, streamlined, normal. Voluntary ritual suicide could become an honorable/sublime thing again.

Phenomena that are cyclical in nature and self-sustaining for that reason are indistinguishable from (actual) infinity. — TheMadFool

You just wanted to use the word infinity here for dramatic flare. Phenomena that are cyclical and self-sustaining are just that.

We've got a little plastic sterling engine(?) snowman in the window sill, who moves his hands all day long if he is exposed to enough light. Put it somewhere where it's always exposed to enough light and there is gaseous temperature gradient as a means for cycling the mechanism it would never stop... until a dog got a hold of it, or some other environmental change, or the wearing of friction.

The dog eating the sterling engine is sort of like the Sun absorbing the Earth. Just have to wait.

Well you smashed my non-explanation to bits. Thank you. :strong:

It makes sense that men are more easily aroused with respect to gamete asymmetry and the cost of resources involved. Males are not burdened with carrying to term which gives them incredible leverage/power between sexes. Easier arousal plays a role in competition for the fairer sex.

The drive to impregnate is on average stronger than the drive to be impregnated.

Therefore the image of the fairer sex (woman) is more of a fetish for men.

But if all males were gay... well... the world would be :flower: marvelous :starstruck: . This is the way to utopia.

I wonder how Cotard delusion patients make sense of the contradiction inherent in their condition. — TheMadFool

It's not a contradiction if they are in the afterlife. :P

We could just ask someone with cotard's delusion what it is like to be dead.

Yep but that was my point. Since the mind can't experience death, it can't conceive of death. — TheMadFool

So also, your mind cannot conceive of dreamless sleep. :P (Our use of language is annoying.)

We can't concieve of mind death. — TheMadFool

Don't you mean we can't experience mind death (ie. the absence of a mind). We can conceive of "mind death" as the absence of a mind, if we infer that a mind exists to begin with. But we sleep and sleep is always bracketed by what isn't sleep/unconsciousness (the qualia horrorshow).

Can we, has anyone, conceived of nonexistence/death? — TheMadFool

Yes. When something is dead it no longer alive and from a qualitative outlook of being in the world and seeing death, beings that have decomposed and personalities that have disappeared, we understand what is generally understood with relation to these deathly experiences. :P

Deep sleep is just like death because death is presumably just the absence of the 1st person view (zero qualia). Since time only passes for the living, you'll be awake far too soon after your dead... but it won't be you because you will have died. You'll be something, either Jane or John Doe, or something very weird but natural.

Edit: The metaphorical/mythic me wants to conceive of the "birth of death" as the act of bringing death(from life) into the world, the cloaked figure fond of drinking coffee, waiting to meet you at the right time and right moment with an accident or a mutually planned meeting.
The white cloaked figure, counterpart, refractable into any color of the rainbow, is getting you into non-fatal life accidents.

All these Koans are interminable and exhausting.

Did you mean Paul Noth ? — Amity

Yes, sorry, I should've linked the cartoon at least. An Army Lines Up for Battle

Have always liked Paul North's Duckrabbit War.

Two opposing armies converge on a battlefield, strangely with same banner, Duckrabbit. Someone on the ground shouts: "There can be no peace until they renounce their Rabbit God and accept our Duck God."

The vast entries of the subreddit, "I'm Sorry Jon" are hilarious(ly disturbing). It's basically the creep of cosmic horror into the Garfield comic. Garfield became a cosmic entity, a Lovecraftian god, which would haunt and terrorize Jon until the end of time.

Do folks born with the inability to feel pain suffer as much psychologically as normal folks? I wonder how much the "ouchie" kind of pain shapes the ability/capacity to feel embarrassed or guilt or are such pathways to suffering more functionally independent in the human person, related to an absence of desire. Are the "pains" of hunger completely unconditioned/unrelated to "ouchie" pain.

Assuming a person was indestructible, more like robot built to be super tough, and could not feel pain, like a toaster, they would not suffer at all compared to a normal person.

Maybe we as humans are to be the nociceptors and sex organs of the machine world.

You're not allowed to repost and link the entire internet randomly in the Lounge. It might cause an embarassing tear in the fabric of space time.

Topping this thread for fun and because I'm strolling through McGilchrist book at 30 minutes a day.

The metaphor of the map and the territory is apt for the McGil's division of the modes of each hemisphere. The Left hemisphere deals with things as represented, reduced to what is known/habituated, to what can be reproduced and manipulated. The Right plays attention to what is "presencing" which in a way always defies capture by its phenomenal multivalence, even if one is focusing on a point.

The author J.L. Borges plays with these oppositional modes in his stories. Reading McGil, I'm reminded of Funes, who after falling off a horse and injuring his head is cursed with a torrential edetic memory.

Because Funes can distinguish every physical object at every distinct time of viewing, he has no clear need of generalization (or detail-suppression) for the management of sense impressions. The narrator claims that this prevents abstract thought, given that induction and deduction rely on this ability. This is stated in the line "To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes, there were nothing but details." — Wikipedia: Funes the Memorious: Generlization

Funes is in some sense trapped in the excessive fullness (unbounded infinity of) what "presences" even though he can still name/recall any and all particulars.

Any strange Hondurian "birds" we ought to know about. You've Toucans down there.



Keel-billed toucan
(Photo Credit: Andy Morffew, Wiki)

Birds don't have spirit animals. You know that. :P

(Photo Source: Wikipedia)

Our true spirit bird is probably the broiler chicken. Or maybe it is the counterpart to the fanciful "spirit" bird, call it the mattering bird.

Behind every spirit bird is a matter bird, that does physical work of pleasing philosophers the most. The bird that "matters" in sandwiches and fry baskets.

If we're allowed to be more goofy and ignore whatever the proper context is...

Life is work, so if nobody wanted to work, we'd all be antinatalists or dead.

Woman should just refuse to reproduce and go on a sex strike to close the pay gap. Of course this is a collaborative impossibility, just like everything else in life. Unions are "evil" unless they are the unions that are allowed to be united... behind closed doors and on the boss' desk.

A war of the sexes might ensue though and we know what half of the species would enslave the other half, with their guns and dicks. Just watch the Handmaid's Tale.

Why not start the question with enslavement of humans (or animals) instead of robots. We treat classes of humans like shit which are much more likely to be sentient than whatever constitutes a "robot".

European Starling (Credit: Tim Felce, Wiki)

They have fancy iridescent and gold-lined black suits, they act like a superfluid in their murmurations and they produce a kind of guano rain that is the bane of Rome.

Eh, get out o here Mike. The mods are probably looking for you.

It's your new social credit score.

Don't let it go negative or you won't be allowed passports, inter-domestic transport, loans and use of other public/private services. Big brother is watching you.

Continue, oh seeker, supreme authority of misanthropic paradox, sensitive to the slightest gestures of of a benign skepticism.

You didn't even clarify whether you accept you're making a naturalistic fallacy.

If everything of and by man is to be rejected, and you are a man, then whatever you are peddling, by your own admission, ought to be rejected. Why do you get a special exemption? Perhaps because of the immense esteem/hubris your grant yourself. You're permitted to insult but cannot stand any reciprocation of insults, even if it is a kind absurd light-hearted play. Chill out dude. You're just like everybody else. You eat, shit, and use up a lot of energy for the sake of farting around. You clitty clack on a keyboard/computer manufactured in China. You pay your bills and your taxes. You read stuff written by others and write back because you're looking for somekind of bond/connection. You have time to kill.

Same old song and dance.

"It seems y’all are deluded in your worth. Let me clarify in a simple way, your value is less than TP for OP. So unfortunately, OP doesn’t care to prescribe anything to anyone. He hasn’t seen anyone worth that trouble."

~Skyblack

But such an investigation into the possibility of the sacred isn't within the filed of thought. Which means such an investigation isn't possible in, or by, anything man has created. Because everything man has created is born of divisive thought and it's fears/neurosis. — skyblack

Did a man create these paragraphs? Do we conceptualize these sentences? Does the blanket statement apply to the author's creation, as special authority for others to follow?

So if we're being prescribed a non-conceptual invitation to pure experience, or meditative sense awareness, what more?

Why isn't the divisive, demeaning, confrontational tit-for-tat, to and from the author, an indicator of fears/neurosis all around.

But in order to inquire and find out if there is anything that is sacred at all, one must have to abandon everything that isn't sacred. Which is everything that man has created. — skyblack

Is it obvious what man has created aside what nature has given us. How does one draw the line between man and nature? Why not conceive everything that man is as purely an outpouring of nature in its wild pluralistic rhizomatic effusions.

The Saudis chop heads off in Deera Square for trivial crimes, while the brutal winter culls all sorts of animals in far Northern latitudes.

Why isn't the conceptual distinction "corrupt" (a naturalist fallacy) out of the gate?

I saw brown bear scat at Polychrome Pass in Denali National Park. It consisted entirely of blue berries and reminded me of jam. Because it was not made by man, presumably, it must be sacred. I just wish I didn't see it through the color-corrupted lens of jam memories and toast remembrance.

If (wo)men are made by (wo)men and are thus (wo)man-made, the only way out I guess is through suicide. Hopefully it is a kind of metaphorical suicide... like I hunt the bear that is my doppelganger and eat his blue berry heart.

Your article link is useful because it is a study of the way the hemispheres function. — Jack Cummins

Actually I've no real clue as to the implications of that paper other than TMS caveats, as iterated in a few other articles. We should all be a bit wary as to drawing any conclusions. McGilchrist's thesis could still be a fanciful expansion of left/right brain myth. The split brained stuff is really fascinating though.

If brain balance is related to education and going along with McGilchrist's schema of disembodied/abstract learning versus embodied learning, we see a real deficit of the latter in U.S. education systems. Kids are turned off from learning because it has become too disembodied... one sits in a chair most of the time, writing with a pencil, staring at a screen, answering fragmentary questions (not connected to a larger project of applicability). Boring as hell, suited for robots only.

Approach Motivation in Human Cerebral Cortex

The Sword and Shield hypothesis is an example of functional lateralization. Supposedly your dominant hand is associated with approach motivation neural circuitry and your non-dominant hand is associated with avoidant motivation neural circuity, generally. So if you ever go to get transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy (TMS) to improve your approach/avoid motivation habits, have them target the correct side based on your handedness.

I can definitely vouch that my brain is imbalanced with respect to approach motivation. I'd like to run away from just about everything.

In predatory birds and animals, it is the left hemisphere that laches on, through the right eye and the right foot, to the prey. — Iain McGilchrist, Master and His Emissary

Unless the bird is left-talon dominant or ambidextrous.

Check out alien hand syndrome.



Tell that non-dominant hand to shut up and shut down. It's just a self-lefteous kill joy. I can do what I want. :P

The cosmic sheet is neither dead or alive.

Twist/fold into whatever shape you'd like, supposing you can. What old narrative (origami story) must we contextualize the question with.

There is also the modular theory of mind, that functions can be lateralized to certain areas of the brain. If we cut the bridge of our hemispheres, we may be dealing with two minds. V.S. Ramachandran has a funny story about a split-brain patient whose hemispheres responded oppositionally when asked whether they believed in God. The left hemisphere was atheist and the right was theist, if I remember correctly. In a person with a sustained corpus callosum, the same opposition might be quenched by functional inhibition of one side.

Seems if we push the metaphysics that denies the self, the boundary layer of "our mind" might be as problematic as the boundary layer of a self. A mind requires the totality of what a mind requires, which includes the world external to the mind that comes to fruition through mind.