You’re talking out your uniformed arse. Confidence isn’t masking the stench of ignorance.

There's are mathematical structures where geometry is valid. There are mathematical structures where our physics is valid. There is a world where a unicorn exists (same structure, different world). — noAxioms

What, valid in the sense that the model and the world both exist and are in an empirical relation?

So we are in the land of epistemology and not ontology? We are talking just about what we agree to be observable rather than what we might believe in terms of our ontic commitments?

We simply never were interested in what might “breath fire” into our equations? I really was wasting my time? :up:

Which guru is your jargon "master"? — Gnomon

I just said the opposite. The problem is that there are so many jargons already. So don’t confuse folk by redescribing the same things yet again. Invest some effort in engaging with the many communities of inquiry that already exist. That way you won’t look like a lone crackpot but someone who is fluent in a difficult and sprawling subject area.

So maybe not recognizing the opportunity to go metaphysical is a feature rather than a bug. — Srap Tasmaner

What does it mean to “go metaphysical”. The word is being used a lot, but do we all have the same understanding of it?

Drawing a hard line between domains of human inquiry seems a mistake. I’m happy when folk just show some good knowledge of the history of metaphysics and then take a certain kind of scholarly approach that melds logic and evidence. It is an attitude of “rational inquiry” that seems easy enough to recognise when it is being employed.

Then if we must draw a tighter line - one meant to rule out theism, idealism, logicism, and other forms of speculation with low empirical content - then we can say we are natural philosophers, starting from the viewpoint that the Cosmos is something of the nature that science typically believes it to be. A deliberately loose definition, but one that emphasises how one ends up having to think about things in the light of the models of reality that prove “unreasonably effective”.

Even within science, there is plenty of metaphysical speculation that just seems plain woo to me. This is the “maths gone made” type thinking that gives you the many worlds interpretation, the ergodic principle, the cyclic universe, and so on.

The reductionist and mechanical basis of most scientific models does then lead to these “exploding landscapes” as the model don’t incorporate their own bounding constraints. They are not holistically closed in the way that a systems description requires.

So from my point of view, much of the metaphysics within physics is fundamentally muddled because physicists are unused to thinking outside this particular box.

But in terms of being freely speculative, I don’t think you could find any other fields like cosmology and particle physics that really let rip in an institutional way. It is the hot zone of metaphysical speculation, even if only sometimes for the also institutional reason that Big Science needs excuses to keep its Big Funding rolling. :lol:

So I'm back to thinking that philosophy is defined as whatever's left over, that it's whatever science hasn't been able to do much with yet. A mere science incubator — or nursery! — as it always has been. Maybe that's okay if we take that role seriously and try to raise good responsible little sciences. — Srap Tasmaner

Many may see the job of philosophy is to be anti-science - its challenger rather than its supporter.

That critic role is also helpful - especially when informed and focused on Scientism.

it would stand to reason that what Russia has on the entire front, rear area and reserves is several orders of magnitude greater and Ukraine is doomed in any sort of war of attrition. — boethius

Yep. It should be no contest. But then Russian incompetence, as all the credible analysis says…

They have a lot of systemic and institutional weaknesses that had been masked because they had not operated on this scale in a really visible way, at least not for quite a while. You’d have to go back to their invasion of Georgia, in 2008, to find something approaching the scale that they’re operating at now. And that one didn’t go well.

They were showing the same kind of problems back then: this disunity of command; logistical weaknesses; poorly trained, poorly motivated, poorly led troops; very poor quality of officer corps; very poor quality of campaign design and ability to plan. They also have very poor integration within and among the armed services, including the synchronization of air and ground operations.

They made misjudgments, but also just institutionally they don’t have the capacity. What we can now see is that they simply do not have the institutional capacity to support offensive operations deep into enemy territory and aren’t able to give units supply and combat support of all kinds: artillery support, air support, air-defense support. With an already weak logistics base, it was an enormous mistake for them to chop their main offensive into four major axes that were widely geographically dispersed. They don’t have enough trucks. They don’t really have expeditionary logistics.

They were driving trucks into Ukraine that were breaking down because they were old, because there had been slipshod maintenance or no maintenance done on these vehicles and they were being operated by troops that didn’t know how to operate and maintain them. That’s why so many of these vehicles were breaking down and being left by the side of the road. That tells you all kinds of things.

It seems like one of the priorities for their modernization project was the air-defense systems, and also their precision-guided munitions—both aircraft-borne and surface-to-surface missiles—and ballistic missiles. But those all failed. You have Turkish-made U.A.V.s flying over the Russian air-defense systems and zapping them from the air—that’s not supposed to be happening. So I don’t really buy it.

Even the quality of the things that did get modernized seems like smoke and mirrors. I find it hard to swallow that they’ve been spending fifty billion, sixty billion, seventy billion dollars a year on modernizing these forces, and, after almost fifteen years of that, they didn’t get around to modernizing their T-72 tank fleet or retiring it. I think the most logical conclusion is that a large portion of that budget was evaporated in corruption.

A bad army was ordered to do something stupid. They were sending armored units just ambling down the road with no infantry screen, no reconnaissance, no air cover. And then the Ukrainians just picked them off with anti-tank weapons. It’s not surprising. The Russians took some of their supposedly élite airborne units and then had them assault toward an airfield.

They were supposed to open up the airfield so they could fly in more ground forces quickly, but their secure communications system failed on the first day. This is why they’ve been dependent on Ukrainian cell-phone towers ever since.

It looks like their officers have been promoted based on patronage as opposed to military ability. We know a lot of the names, including the guy [General Aleksandr Dvornikov] who’s been named the over-all commander now. In Syria, it looked to me like their focus was not really on effective military operations but, rather, on trying to acquire assets—trying to acquire property and revenues for themselves from the Syrian regime or from other actors—and, secondly, on using Syria as a test bed for weapons systems. But they were not terribly impressive in their planning or decision-making in Syria.

What we’ve seen in action is a military machine on the Russian side that could not pull off a confrontation with any nato power. So escalating into a confrontation with nato would be suicidal for them. And I have to believe that they’re not suicidal. Imagine if that invasion force had stumbled into Poland instead. The casualties that we’re seeing now are high enough, but the entire invasion force would’ve been wiped out.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/is-the-russian-military-a-paper-tiger

Interesting account of why Hostomel went so wrong. Imagine being a paratrooper and only discovering you are being dropped into a war zone as you are choppering in.

Stuck in a foxhole for three days on the edge of a runway as the second wave couldn’t land and no equipment arriving until ground forces showed up. Only survivor in his platoon.

These are simple, rational arguments based on contemporary military logic, in light of which much of the popular narratives can be dismissed outright. — Tzeentch

If the army had been so competent, why has Putin fired so many of his generals?

Far from bestowing glory on Russia’s military brass, the war in Ukraine is proving toxic for top commanders, with at least eight generals fired, reassigned or otherwise sidelined since the start of the invasion on Feb. 24.

After a long string of failures and few significant victories, the knives now seem to be out for Russian generals, amid criticism from prominent Russian military correspondents, state television propagandists and even members of the normally obedient parliament.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/07/russia-military-commanders-dismissed-war/

My one unending, drum beating message for almost all the time I've been on the forum has been that metaphysical statements are not true or false. They have not truth value. — T Clark

You talk past my point about counterfactuals. Metaphysical claims are empty if they are "not even wrong" as theories. But if they claim something measurable, then you have something to compare and contrast.

To say reality is continuous is on its own pretty meaningless. But saying it is continuous rather than discrete is where we can start figuring out how to start measuring that. That's why Fermilab built a holometer.

The Peircean wrinkle is that such dichotomies must themselves emerge into being. Or at least that is his metaphysical claim when if comes to his logic of vagueness.

But hey. That only means you can now oppose vagueness to crispness. You have established counterfactuality at that deeper ontological level – one that speaks direct to emergent holism as the counterfactual alternative to brute realism.

Now the scientific prediction is that the discrete and the continuous must be scalefree emergent states of reality. They become the mutually opposed limits on physical being.

And suddenly decoherent quantum physics and the Planck scale reciprocal constants make much more sense. That is exactly what we see in the conformal lightcone structure of the Universe. Integration and differentiation - as the continuous and the discrete – emerging over all available cosmic scales.

So quantum tunnelling ain't quantum physics. You learn something new everyday. :roll:

What physicists inappropriately label "Negentropy" is what I call, "Enformy". — Gnomon

I think if you are the guy who half invented quantum mechanics – Schrodinger – and you called it negative entropy to make the infodynamic connection explicit in making your argument for code-based life, then you get to claim what is appropriate. :roll:

Generally, you seem quite uniformed about the wide range of scientific views that have led to this information theoretic turn in physics (and life science).

If you are genuinely interested, you wouldn't have to invent your own jargon. You would start by mastering all the jargons that have been created so as to then start to see the broader outlines of this central modern metaphysical project.

The point of the forks is that we both can see the different responses to the same thing and be right, meaning we aren't seeing the same thing yet aren't wrong, right there at the table. — Banno

The multiplicity of first person views is what underwrites the unity of the third person point of view.

But then we know how your plain language lumpen realism always conflates this familiar dialectical distinction.

What Banno sees as plain as the nose on his face is what the whole world ought to see with equal incuriosity. :wink:

:up:

A little, but again that's not quantum physics. — Darkneos

That ceased to be a viable claim in 1966.

de Vault, D. & Chance, B. Studies of phosynthesis using a pulsed laser. i. Temperature dependence of cytochrome oxidation rate in Chromatium. Evidence for tunneling. Biophys. J. 6, 825 (1966)

And is a quite ludicrous statement now. Biophysics has all the receipts.

Electron-transfer chain in respiratory complex I
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05779-y

It's the world that's wonderful. — T Clark

But how much of it can you see?

metaphysical claims have no truth value. — T Clark

What? They are how we can even derive counterfactuals to test. They are the axiomatic basis of truth claims.

Don't think that's how it works. — Darkneos

Have you studied biophysics?

I couldn’t follow your reasoning there.

A competent feint would be as convincing as possible while consuming as little men and material as possible.

Now if there were credible evidence that the Russians were happy to sacrifice the paratroops to a mock “airbridge” operation, then sure. We could start to take that more seriously. But detailed accounts of the assault give good reason for why the follow up landings of a heavier force had to be hastily cancelled, even while the transports were in the air.

What caps it for me is the ludicrous way Russia propaganda still had to pretend a successful airbridge operation took place. It seems that this brave and bold image of Russian competence was so important to morale that it had to be faked for domestic consumption.

Oh the ever compounding irony.

Everyone? You're literally debating right now the issue with 3 other interlocutors who disagree. — boethius

I wasn’t talking about anonymous keyboard warriors of course. I meant credible public sources.

That is not a sign of military incompetence. The issue of whether it was politically wise, — boethius

The two ain’t exactly mutually exclusive. Indeed they are evidence that a kleptocracy now getting sentimental about lost imperial promise is a generally incompetent structural setting.

If you read the analysis cited, what actual experts believed before the war was that an invasion would be costly, involving thousands KIA and significant armour and airframe losses. — boethius

That is true. And it is also true that the degree of military incompetence was a surprise to these same analysts. Indeed a happy bonus from a hawkish US perspective as it created the chance to mire Russia in its own backyard Afghanistan.

Putin’s ineptitude looks to be delivering the US’s every defence policy wish. NATO expanded overnight. Russian oil gone. Putinism destined to die the death of a thousand cuts.

All they have to avoid now is nuclear escalation and the US finally wins biggly in a proxy war.

However, we're now at a point in the war where Ukraine has lost all of its initial tank stock and is now nearing critical depletion of all the Soviet tanks NATO could scrounge up and send. — boethius

But the Russian collapse is delivering more tanks and ammo to the Ukrainians in a few weeks than the west supplied in seven months. Of course the quality isn’t so great. But you know. Russian incompetence. :confused:

What is your source for this? — Paine

Pravda?

Russia officially becomes 113,000 square kilometers larger
See more at https://english.pravda.ru/news/russia/154246-russia_new_territories/

What I find most interesting about the incompetence narrative is that's it's needed to support the idea there should not be any negotiation strategy — boethius

Who says that?

Everyone agrees about the surprising degree of Russian incompetence, but who says that is the reason not to negotiate. It would seem that all the reverses strengthen Ukraine’s negotiating position. The only issue is whether Putin has rational demands given his inchoate anti-West rants.

I like this calm summary for the reasons behind Russia’s systemic military incompetence….

I do. I marvel all the time. — T Clark

But just not at the metaphysics of being apparently. So why hang around these threads to tell folk that?

It’s not like I would join a cake making site or train travel blog to talk about the wonder of an existence that is founded on its own dialectical necessity. We reject the mechanical only to find the mechanical is what then must be recovered in the quantum limit of that rejection. We reject the global to embrace the local only to find the global is what then must be recovered in the relativistic limit of that rejection.

It is fine to carve out your own domains of expertise and interest. But once you go looking for a place where you can assert a stance of lumpen realism - an anti-metaphysics agenda - then you are now engaging in the very thing you claim to be rejecting.

Sense the pattern? Like a moth to a flame, you are being drawn to a dialectic where you might recover lumpen realism in the limit of everyday, unphilosophical, mundanity.

The logic of the dialectic is so strong, nothing escapes it. The desire to reject metaphysics is itself what must manifest metaphysics as the “other” which has been placed at the greatest possible distance.

A lack of gee whiz is the blunting which then defines what is antithetically the sharp.

You are caught in the web of denying there is a web to be caught in.

QM says that things work differently at small scale than they do up here where we are. — T Clark

But your body and brain depend on being able to harness quantum chemistry. Life and mind start at the quasi-classical nanoscale of molecular machines where proteins can beat the classical odds by employing quantum tricks.

So without the ability to harness things like quantum tunneling, enzymes and respiratory chains wouldn’t work. Photosynthesis wouldn’t exist. Sensory receptors would be impossible.

I think you are just too dismissive of the quantum realm. It is how there could even be the classical realm as its “other”.

It is crazy that nature even exists in one form. It is doubly crazy that a second form hatches emergently from that. It is triply crazy that even the quantum form has to be emergent - or at least that is an implication of the success of quantum field theory.

So stand back and marvel of all that we have discovered - some of it only very recently.

So, you are not just a "bag of chemicals", you are a walking, talking, thinking, feeling, self-governing, purposeful, opinionated system of Information. — Gnomon

Or indeed, to move us even more towards a general theory of organisms, we aren’t even just structures of information. Life and mind are dissipative structures organised by semiosis. We are structures of meaning or negentropy.

You believe this is evidence? — Tzeentch

Your argument is so under water that all I can hear is the bubbling.

I challenged your story that the Russian attempt to secure an airfield somehow proved the Russian intentions towards Kiev - something for which you haven't provided a shred of evidence. — Tzeentch

You are so funny. Making shit up off the top of your head. Read and weep….

At around 6:00 PM on February 24th, 2022, head of Bellingcat (a widely respected international group of investigative journalists) Christo Grozev reported that 18 Russian Il-76 military transport planes were flying from Pskov to Kyiv. However, it soon became apparent that events were not unfolding according to the scenario established by the Russians. The first paratroopers did not manage to accomplish their objective and the Ils changed their course to the Belarusian city of Gomel. Later, after establishing control over the airfield, the Russians tried to repair the runway. However, this also proved to be impossible due to the constant fighting, which prevented the Russians from implementing their plan logistically. Instead of landing on the threshold of Kyiv, several thousand Russian paratroopers were forced to advance on the Ukrainian capital on their own.

Russian propaganda interprets the events in a profoundly different way. As early as the afternoon of February 25th, 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that the Antonov airport had been seized the day before after a successful operation involving 200 helicopters, the suppression of all Ukrainian air defense systems and the complete isolation of the landing area from the air. According to the Russian version of events, 200 paratroopers allegedly landed, fought a successful battle, captured the airfield and the military base, repelled all Ukrainian counterattacks, facilitated the landing of Russia’s main forces and defended the facility without losing a single soldier. At the same time, 200 “Ukrainian nationalists” were purportedly eliminated during the operation.

The scale of the attack, particularly in relation to the number of helicopters, is wildly overstated and not supported by any existing evidence. Russian propaganda tried to cover up the failure of the landing by describing an attack on an absurd scale. At that time, Russian armor convoys had entered Hostomel. After connecting the remnants of the first Russian landing group with the rest of the airborne forces and reinforcements supplied by additional army units, the airport came under the control of the Russian army.

The fixation of Russian propagandists on the number 200 has a history of its own that goes back as far as the Incident at the Pristina airport in June 1999, when 200 Russian airborne troops seized the international airport of Pristina (the capital of the Republic of Kosovo). The incident was also considered to be a “pre-emptive" operation that took place surrounded by enemy forces, namely actual NATO troops, not imagined ones. Russia assigned an epochal historical significance to the incident, calling it "the beginning of the transition to an independent foreign policy."

The victory in Hostomel was supposed to be a triumph of the Russian military and constitute a new milestone in Russian geopolitics. These goals were not achieved, but Russia is not used to departing from a story that it has already announced as factual. Therefore, the myth engineering shifted its focus to an unequal battle. Stories about the "200 Spartans" and the "heroes of Hostomel" began to circulate in Russian social networks, including a poem that was written in their honor which later would later become a song.

In mid-July 2022, Russia published a video with footage of both the landing in Mozyr, Belarus and the 45th Separate Guards Special Forces Brigade (based in Kubinka, near Moscow) disembarking at the Antonov airport. The military personnel of this airborne unit did actually occupy Hostomel, but they most likely entered the village after crossing into Ukraine from Belarus after February 24th, 2022 along with the armored convoys. Certain Russian brigades were also swapped out in order to further serve Russian propaganda narratives. Instead of the decimated 31st Brigade, whose participation in the assault has been confirmed by Ukrainian and foreign sources, Russian media widely glorified the 45th Brigade, which did not suffer devastating losses. Despite their best efforts, Russian propaganda outlets could not change the factual reality of the events - Russia had lost the battle, despite its own superiority in manpower and equipment.

The architect of the military operation to storm the Antonov airport remains unknown. However, the course of the actual battle, the results of the battle and Russia’s attempts to rewrite history are evidence to the fact that the authors did not give adequate consideration to the impending assault. On February 27th, 2022, the Ukrainian Security Service released documents recovered from soldiers of the Russian National Guard that had been killed near Hostomel, including call signs, planned maneuvers, conventional designations, ciphers, and more. In addition to the general utility these documents supplied to the Ukrainian special services, the information provides further supporting evidence for the idea of a planned Russian blitzkrieg. Russian units tasked with dispersing Ukrainian rallies and protests were just behind the initial invasion forces leading the assault into Ukraine, as Russian strategists did not anticipate they would encounter serious resistance.

https://rusaggression.gov.ua/en/russian-occupiers-fail-to-secure-their-foothold-in-the-attack-on-kyiv-eb11ccc699f8e6de615c66aafee4b5bb.html

do you think are reasonable speculations in relation to QM? Do you think it can point to idealism? — Tom Storm

Definitely not. As I’ve said in other threads, thermal decoherence is a robust explanation for how a wavefunction can be so contextually constrained that it is as good as a collapse. You could say the outcome is still probabilistic, but the probability becomes 1 (or 0).

The human observer thus collapses the wavefunction by imposing such constraint - after first also preparing a system that is unconstrained and isolated from thermal noise.

So the collapse doesn’t seem like such a mystery anymore because the quantum maths has had a statistical mechanics module bolted on. The noisy thermal environment that is always present is included in the probability calculus.

The weirdness is reduced to the nonlocality or contextuality of the act of decoherence. In a limited and probabilistic sense, the constraints must transcend space and time to exert their effect. So you get “retrocausal” effects like the quantum eraser.

This is only starting to be taken seriously recently. I cited Emily Adlam’s work.

So there is weirdness to tackle. And the deep aspect has been put off for a long time. Spatial nonlocality is an everyday fact now. But temporal nonlocality still really screws with people’s classical prejudices about causal,order.

But hey. That boat already sailed with special relatively you would have thought.

Denying its use to the enemy, securing it for future use, etc. — Tzeentch

Another illogical reply. Just bomb it if you need to deny its use.

And what future use do you now have in mind? And long would a gang of paratroopers be expected to sit around the edge of a runway while a war was going on?

This was a feint, remember? Your story was there was no intended future use at all. Kyiv was a ruse to fix Ukrainian forces who might otherwise head for the Donbas.

So why would Russia fly crack paratroopers to the front line with the very important job of protecting a transport airfield so no one with bombs might decide to hurt it.

Your claims of military expertise are just so laughable.

Also, what would air assault troops be using an airfield for? Landing helicopters perhaps? — Tzeentch

Yes. Helicopters are famous for needing long runways designed for cargo planes. How did I miss that?

But on the other hand, who cares? Sure, you do and I do and a bunch of other dorks do. — T Clark

Thanks. So you, Banno, and others come crowding on to these kinds of threads to show that you don’t take deep and interesting questions seriously. You know better because you haven’t learnt either the physics or the metaphysics. Ignorance of the subject matter becomes your trump card.

C’mon. You can do better than that.

For me, in the case of Ukraine, it's important to try and stop a nuclear disaster, which, though not certain, is within the realm of possibility. — Manuel

Yeah. I had viewed it as a low probability we would even see a tactical nuke. But that has shifted a lot in a few weeks.

The US seems to have good inside information though. They would have a sense of what to do. But maybe so many Gasprom execs have fallen out windows that the intelligence is drying up.

I don't think disliking the Taliban is a good reason to allow millions of people to die of starvation. That's a big issue, with a solution. — Manuel

I agree. But imagine how the Republicans would spin it. Another reason Biden would just want everyone to forget about it.

It's a philosophy forum, — Banno

Where folk are opining about classical and quantum models of reality.

If you want to participate productively in such a thread, then leave your lumpen realism behind. Let’s get properly metaphysical. Stop hiding behind Wittgenstein’s skirts.

Better, the mooted distinction between epistemology and ontology is here misplaced. Always, already interpreted. — Banno

So “philosophy” is taking everything at face value rather than digging into it. I realise that is indeed your philosophy. It is why you simply assert a position and avoid presenting some actual argument.

Why would you expect events at scales of 10 or 15 orders of magnitude smaller than ours to act the same way they do up here? — T Clark

It is the flat contradictions in the causality that creates the angst. Sure, you can take the epistemic or modelling perspective that says we simply construct the pragmatic story that captures sufficient truth at each level. So shut up and calculate.

But this invokes an ontology of emergent properties. And so you are just moving the metaphysical questions back to that next grounding level.

For example, you can get into the hierarchy theory debate about whether emergence is all about supervenience - so microstate realism about emergent macrostates - or instead the kind of Peircean holism that I always promote.

So why is quantum reality nonlocal and classical reality local? Why is quantum reality indeterminate or vague, and classical reality definite or crisp? Is it just epistemic accident we arrived at such contrasting causal axioms, or is it instead the big clue that shows there is a directly reciprocal relation in which reality emerges from the manifestation of that causal dialectic.

There is a productive conversation to be had about an ontology in which it is opposition that nature must manifest. Hence making the argument that this famous causal contradiction between the classical and the quantum is what a dialectical metaphysics predicts, rather than an unfortunate feature that more reductionist metaphysics must eliminate.

As a matter of convention, I think it makes sense to think of interactions at human scale as foundational, at least for bookkeeping purposes. It was at that level that the whole concept of reality was established. It's at that level that most people experience reality directly. It's at that level where noting weird is going on. — T Clark

There is an argument to be had there. We can build the subjective anthropomorphic view into our metaphysics.

But how is that to be done in a way that simply doesn't serve to contradict all attempts by physics to then take the objective "view from nowhere" as its highly productive metaphysics? And what happens when that unreasonably effective route has to turn around and recover its own subjective point of departure?

That is how all the quantum mysticism arises. If the foundation is the human observer making measurements – regardless of whether it is with their wide bum, or a clock and ruler – then how does this "classical" picture account for whatever emergently leads to the collapse of the wavefunction?

So a commonsensical everyday metaphysics of "medium sized dry goods" and "bums in armchairs, cats on mats, stones kicked in the street" doesn't either lead to the objectivity science seeks, nor give it a secure place to make its return. As usual with Banno, it is naive realism concealing naive idealism.

There just "isn't a problem" we are told. Reality is whatever "I" see. It is "my" experience of it from doing all the things that "I" want to do.

And as I reminded elsewhere recently, Newtonian mechanics was deeply weird when the classical view of physics was actually crystallised in differential equations. It was not at all natural once you go beyond the everyday of billiard balls bouncing around a baize table.

Newton just junked Aristotle's impetus and Descartes' corpuscles. He enshrined Leibniz's teleological principle of least action. He did a whole lot of things that defied what had seemed commonsense principles.

Have you ever tried making sense of action and reaction as a symmetrically opposed pair of force vectors? Or is it only me that saw that as the answer to how rockets worked in a picture book when I was 7 years old and thought, hey, that's a completely bogus metaphysics! :razz:

So you were on the nose with your earlier remark about scales of observation. But my point here is about taking the ontology seriously once you have indeed sorted out your epistemology.

And naive realism that dissolves into naive idealism without even being aware of it is not a sorted-out epistemology. It is 1950s plain speaking bullshit.

Just real. Arses on armchairs. — Banno

So no actual science. Just "ordinary language reality". The view suitably constrained to make predicate logic seem the philosophical theory of everything. Same old, same old. :up:

What is foundational depends on what one is doing. — Banno

You are conflating epistemology with ontology when the question becomes about what Nature is doing.

Rookie error.

the chair remains very real. — Banno

What, really real or emergently real?

What ontological commitment are you wanting to make in terms of “reality”. How much inconvenient metaphysics did you mean to sweep under the carpet?

It is right that reality looks different at different scales of interaction. And so that makes us ask which scale is foundational and which is emergent.

After that comes the realisation that all scales must be co-emergent. Which is where the metaphysical conversation really starts to fly.

But back to lumpen materialist statements about asses interacting with armchairs.

Is that the same book as The World After the War, also 2018? That’s what’s in my library.

You grew up in HK? — frank

Yep. Early 1960s. You have a connection?

Most people in the US govt thought the British and French Empires were going to come back after WW2. It took a while for it to sink in that they weren't.

The idea started to take root that communism would grow until the British and Americans had no one to make a profit off of but each other. That was the genesis of the idea of the US taking the place of the British Empire. — frank

Again, do you have a particular source? I'm genuinely interested.

The Fifty Year Wound, Derek Leebaert — frank

Same book?

:up:

I don't think that it's necessarily the Geneva Convention that limits state behavior in war, but domestic populations, who have grown to see war as an evil. So the Vietnam War was much worse than Iraq, in terms of methods employed and war crimes, yet the Geneva Convention applied to both. — Manuel

Sure, that is true. It was once enough for a population simply to hear their leaders stand up and make the promises. Embedded journalists with camera evidence meant the population had to be actually seeing the promises were somewhat true on the ground.

The Vietnam images of little girls being napalmed certainly changed attitudes on Vietnam.

By Iraq, the US knew it had to get in first with its grainy video of precision munitions surgically taking out the tanks and trucks. The suitably distanced view that set the narrative of surgical strikes on anonymous targets.

Is the fact that Kiev still a running city a reason as to why the Russians are so violent? — Manuel

I earlier posted how Kyiv is rather sacred to the Russian people as their historic civilisational centre. It wouldn't play well with the home crowd.

Moscow’s ruling establishment feels so emotional because the first Russian state called Kievan Rus was established in Kiev 12 centuries ago. Even the name of Russia originated in the name of this loose confederation of Eastern Slavic, Baltic and Finnic nations.

Rurik, the founding leader of the Kievan Rus dynasty, has been considered one of the godfathers of the Russian state.

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/why-ukraine-matters-to-russia-so-much-52281

But then there are cases which are illustrative. I mentioned the Afghan case, which you can look up. It illustrates to me the double standards "the West" has in its proclamations of "freedom and democracy". — Manuel

I guess I just take the double standards as already the well understood context. I haven't paid particular attention to what's been happening in Afghanistan after Biden's abrupt withdrawal as it seems only the everyday level of geopolitical dysfunction.

Although it would perhaps tell something of Biden's mind when it comes to dealing with crisis. Did he show his senility, or did he show hawkish judgement? Just drop the small problems. Focus on the big ones, like a chance to dissolve Russia back to its constituent particles for a second time running.

I had the impression you were a science guy - we talked briefly, or better stated, you gave me your views on Peirce. Very interesting job to have. — Manuel

I'm a science guy too. But I always knew how much fun being a journalist could be. And while doing science, I looked at my professors and decided I didn't want to be constrained to studying tiny slivers of the big picture the world has to offer. Journalism is training in being an outsider who gets to go inside anywhere. You can follow your curiosity endlessly. And get well paid. It was the ideal vehicle to get access to the whole of the human story.

Then again, the propaganda system in our countries tend to be very sophisticated compared to authoritarian systems. — Manuel

I posted above about information autocracy. Putin exists because the propaganda system has evolved on that side of game as well.

Dictatorship was based on fear. Totalitarians such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined repression with indoctrination into ideologies that demanded devotion to the state. They tried to isolate citizens from the world with censorship, travel restrictions, and limits on trade.

Now a modified authoritarianism has been spreading. From Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, illiberal leaders have managed to concentrate power without cutting their countries off from global markets, imposing exotic social philosophies, or resorting to mass murder.

Many of these new-style autocrats have come to office in elections and managed to preserve a democratic facade. Rather than jailing thousands, they target opposition activists, harassing and humiliating them, accusing them of fabricated crimes, and encouraging them to emigrate. When these autocrats kill, they seek to conceal their responsibility.

The key to such regimes, we argue, is the manipulation of information. Rather than terrorizing or indoctrinating the population, rulers survive by leading citizens to believe—rationally but incorrectly—that they are competent and public-spirited. Having won popularity, dictators score points both at home and abroad by mimicking democracy.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.33.4.100

For Tzeentch, the question of intent and planning seems to be on hold until the day documents and investigations can prove one view against the other. He has ruled out any reports presently available to us as being valid. Also, he has said that he is not providing a competing assessment of actual intent but only offering 'speculation' of what might be the purpose of the operation. — Paine

Right. None of which makes any sense of his desire to participate in some random political thread on some random philosophy website.

But he does make bold claims, like AA making an airbridge "impossible", without documents or investigation. We are supposed to believe his personal authority as an anonymous "military expert" with a list of talking points.

I say, put up or shut up. But I also realise that is not how things work on the net.

So, his or her claim that using airborne troops to secure an airport in order to establish an airbridge is simply inconceivable in this situation is not an argument for an alternate purpose. By the rules of evidence being demanded by him or her, that cannot be stated. — Paine

Again, he did make a positive claim. AA always would have made the airbridge an impossibility. Hence we ought to believe "feint".

He just jumps back behind his "cautious" demands for "real evidence" when he gets pressed in an uncomfortable fashion.

That mission was the fallout of the demise of the British Empire, which had the job of securing the infrastructure of global trade prior to WW2. — frank

To nit-pick, that would have been different – a forerunner model in terms of fleets and bases, but focused on protecting sea routes connecting the UK's own far-flung empire. But then there might have been "mission creep" as there was also the value in making the British pound the world currency. Confidence in the empire as a friend was a pragmatic goal.

The US wanted a stable world after WW2 more than the free trade, which it didn't really need. It was a way to hardwire a more peaceful set-up that could also pay for its own rebuild. The self-serving part of the deal was killing the pound and nixing an actual world currency, leaving the way clear for King Dollar.

But then also corporate America developed fast on the back of free flowing oil and the US baby boom. The US could replicate that part of the UK empire model on an even more planetary scale.

So yep, history repeats. Just on bigger scale. China's belt and road is the attempt to weave Asia and Africa into a sphere of influence in the "coming multipolar world", which seemed a thing even recently. The EU-Nato were going to be the third power as the US retreated back into its North American fortress under Trump and Biden.

Another geopolitical scenario that may have been derailed by Putin's existential gamble.

Sometime around 1949 a secret study was performed by the US govt to determine the cost of taking the place of the British. The study said the figure was uncountable, so they mulled over whether they could do the job of the British with nuclear weapons. — frank

Any source on that? I've read quite a bit about the UK to US power transition. It is quite fascinating as it was what was happening in real time when I was a kid in Hong Kong and Singapore. I got to feel the imperial oppression of two empires. Stereo instead of mono. That may explain something. :razz:

This war may have at least one virtue, if it reconciles the Russian elite with the importance of telling the truth. — Olivier5

Unfortunately this is instead in line with the standard practice of deflecting the blame away from Putin and towards all those who let the glorious leader down. It is time to make more examples of drunk and cowardly generals.

The official story is being adjusted so the public is moved in the direction of this framing.

The whole information autocracy thing is fascinating - Informational Autocrats - Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman - https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.33.4.100

It is a deliberate tactic that the Kremlin has dissonant voices and conflicting messages out in public so that the public is confused and seeking answers. Then they can be nudged towards the narrative that best protects the central power.

Vlad Vexler: “Putin’s propaganda doesn’t try to persuade you of an alternate reality that you should believe in. It tries to manipulate your sense of reality. It basically tries to saturate the informational environment with incompatible pictures of reality – and the aim isn’t to persuade you of anything. It isn’t to initiate you into a kind of political mobilization, into a kind of vision.
The aim is to de-politicize you to make you feel well this is too complex for me to engage in and make you feel that maybe there isn’t such a thing as an unqualifiedly stateable truth about anything.

Soviet propaganda was clear: this is the truth and if you don’t believe in that you’re wrong
Putin propaganda does not try to tell you we have the story here this is what you believe
Putin propaganda tries to tell you “Look, this is a very complex world,” and there are claims and counterclaims and then it tries to pump information at you from all directions and the idea is that you simply give up on politics that’s the key aspiration and it’s been working very tragically effectively.”