https://www.ft.com/content/dc70777f-05d9-4e44-8217-30f448e2b64f

Finland to decide within ‘weeks’ whether to join Nato

This is scary. It makes sense. But damn, what a mess.

Yeah. No.

That's for another thread.

That's a good diversion.

Ask Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, in fact all of South America.

What does that have to do with anything? Like at all?

Clearly the US, but that's immaterial to this.

They can have a crap army, it doesn't matter. North Korea's apparently is pretty crap. They don't get invaded.

Wouldn't want a hostile military nation living next to me, no. Obviously.

What?

Oh, then let Russia put a base in Mexico in Canada, no problem.

Well. They could. They've surprised me before with this war.

However, they have been warned about the use of chemical weapons. I don't think many people want to rush to WWIII, but who knows?

Hard to believe she's still taken seriously. I mean, I prefer Deepak Chopra, literally.

Stuck up *****.

Sorry. Had to get that out of my system.

I mean, there should be people around that remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, not just Chomsky.

But it's also cheap votes. It's disgusting. But - nothing new.

I mean, I know the initial shock of this war has blown over - for those of us not in it in real time - but it's far from clear we are out of the woods yet.

Took them long enough to say this. They've been really trying to make it seem as if there's almost no chance this can happen here, or a very low chance.

I think it's higher.

But yes, you are correct, these are people that should be taken seriously.

Well. Maybe. But they surely must have heard that NATO will intervene if they use chemical weapons, or at least, this is what they've stated.

The point is that time is against them (Russia), so either they do something big quickly, or it will get very ugly for them.

I'm surprised that Russia is allowing for other countries to send arms to Ukraine.

This still has a long ways to go, ffs. It's already been way too long. Each day these sanctions will bite more and more and then, we may see the Russians go crazy.

Not good.

Austria’s Nehammer ‘pessimistic’ over Putin’s ‘war logic’

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer has said he was “rather pessimistic” about the prospects for diplomacy ending the Ukraine conflict after his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Describing Putin as having “massively entered into a logic of war”, Nehammer told reporters following his meeting that he was “rather pessimistic” about the success of negotiations “because peace talks are always very time-intensive while military logic says: ‘Don’t spend too much time and go directly into battle'”.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/10/russia-ukraine-live-news-war-to-slash-ukraines-gdp-by-45

The only thing I like about "analytic" philosophy is that they try to be clear. But some of them do lack content, at least for me. Quine, for instance, does nothing for me, nor does Kripke or Lewis.

Of course the world is interesting, there are many ways to tackle it. I tend to find certain figures enlighten me more than others, often in an eclectic manner.

But the world should be analyzed correctly too, one can easily confuse elaborate constructions for insight about the world, or the mind for that manner.

Again, Heidegger is interesting, Husserl is fine, but goes into mental gymnastics often. I don't find much of anything in Levinas.

I think that what you're saying was already well known thousands of years ago, and was even discussed by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue.

And all this elaboration on speech and meaning were already discussed very sensibly by Locke, Reid, Priestley and others.

Was there more added later on? Very much so. Quite a lot.

I think you simplify analytic philosophy. People like Nagel, Haack, Tallis, McGinn and a few others are very, very good.

But, to each there own.

I would agree.

I think however there are some very useful pearls of insights in Descartes and Cudworth (who is unknown) that really set the stage for a kind of special "power" in our souls, in which with our "cognoscitive" powers we are able to take stimulations (not objects) and enliven them.

Once this is cleared up a bit, I think one could proceed down the lines of "reduction" or Tallis "episteogony" and much else that follows. But before checking consciousness, I think there are some obscure factors in play, which allow the mind to have the capacities it does.

Recommendations without a area of interest are very strange to me. If you specify, I'm interested in Chomsky's political (or philosophical) recommendations, then that's fine.

But to ask, what book must be read? Assumes there has to be such a book. The onus is on the person providing the book to say what this book must be read, out of all possible books.

He's happy to get people thinking for themselves. I think he wants to find out the truth, but knowns that in human affairs, there are likely no final answers.

It's extremely long, and should only be of interests to those who think what he's saying makes sense.

I was only half-joking about "having" to read that book.

I agree with others here that there is no must read, especially in philosophy - there are too many ways of thinking about the world and people often feel attracted to very different perspectives, making recommendations pointless.

Unless they are looking for a specific branch of philosophy, then one can throw out some suggestions.

Understanding Power interviews with Noam Chomsky

And then whatever you think is interesting. :cool:

What I'd like to do with Tallis as an extension of Heidegger is to continue to explore the notion of making knowledge visible. I think that in a time when a great deal of discussion in the phil. of mind is about neuroscience and these abstract models that I think are generally very misleading, essentially a more sophisticated version of what the 17th century classics called "animal spirits" acting in the brain, a new approach is badly needed.

These models often make us out to be much more passive creatures than we actually are.

Yes, there is a lot of literature about Heidegger on the environment, technology, science, history and so on. Some of it is interesting (Dreyfus, Caputo, Fink), some if it is very bad (Derrida, parts of Foucault, Levinas - though I might get hate for mentioning him.). I personally can't see a positive project I can make out of it. So I'm grateful to have read him and I admire his uniqueness, but, I had my fill.



Thank you.

I suppose that some of the problem here has to do with our intuitions. Had we better intuition (differently "constructed") we could perhaps see how mind emerges. We seem to lack such intuition.

I eventually felt that he lead me nowhere. He has a very unique capacity to make the ordinary seem extraordinary, but I can't build off of that. And the distinguished philosophers who followed him (Sartre, Gadamer, etc.) didn't really expand on what he said to my satisfaction.

He can be read in too many ways, and although you can always find a quote of his to contradict a statement he said elsewhere, he didn't really illuminate much on the mind, which is what I think is fruitful.

In short, I got stuck there with no way out. So it stopped being such a novelty. I still think he's interesting, but I prefer other methods of philosophizing, such as Tallis whom I think "does Heidegger" better because one can work on his foundations, and some of the classics of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, who have rich insight that I can try to do something with.

I used to like Heidegger, now less so, but he's interesting. Husserl has insightful things to say, but I do think he gets caught up in very serious mental gymnastics.

But to be fair, Husserl was following Descartes to an extent. The Continentals skipped over the empiricists, which I think is a mistake. I won't hide my pro-Locke, pro-Hume biases and although I think Locke has some chapters which I think should be mandatory reading for phil of mind, skipping over Hume is pretty remarkable. He's a force, I think.

But those figures you mentioned are good, I just really dislike postmodernism. That's where I draw the line.

I don't agree. Not that I think Quine or Kripke are too interesting, but contemporary continental philosophy is pretty bland to me.

Chomsky is excellent. I think people often read into some superficial notions of "scientism", which I think is a mistake.

But Kant is fantastic. Schopenhauer maybe better.



99% of the time we are not free? That's a bit much, no?

I take that to be self evident. Though I'm not particularly analytic. I'd say I'm 17th, 18th century phil + Chomsky and Tallis.

And a bit of Galen Strawson. But pure analytic phil, depending on the figures, doesn't satisfy me.

Yep. You and I are virtually on the same page on almost all topics. I wonder why? ;)

And yes, we can put words into a "question like" format, doesn't mean it's coherent or sometimes, even answerable by us.

I'm not much into political philosophy. I like phil of mind, epistemology, metaphysics. And on these alone, they have so much gold. Much richer than most modern interpretations.

But I'm sure they both have quite sensible things to say about politics too.

I have nothing against what you said. And you are correct, there are mysteries in science too. But I do think that many of the classical philosophical questions are so hard, we don't even know how to go about even giving a good answer. Free will, for instance, or how can matter think? We know it can, but have zero clue as to how it does this.

Yes, it is true that religion and philosophy can be ridiculed and that some of that ridicule is at times, relevant. I love navel gazing, so I'm restricted to phenomenology and better descriptions, it does it for me. But it won't fulfill others.

As for questions that get answered, that's correct. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "philosophy" and what kind of questions you have in mind. If you mean, say, political philosophy, then yes, I think you are correct.

I too value empiricism and empirical evidence. Incidentally, as a side note, Locke and Hume were MUCH more sophisticated than many so called "empiricists" today, but, there are things we know with little evidence or were we only have intuition or best guesses.

That's fine. Where does one go? Depends on each person, I personally like descriptive generalization that make sense to me, that can help elucidate what I experience, obviously inadequately, but it's an approximation.

Others will deny that the self is a problem at all.

Some think science offers all answers.

Some become mystics.

I think the topics I listed are a mystery and are studied (or discussed and elaborated) and we still debate them, with no resolution on the horizon.

Religion is very complex and I would probably say that it's even impoverished by the Western entanglement with Christianity, which, compared to other religions, is pretty boring. At least to me.

But existence can be looked at through many lenses, not limited to religion.

Screw it, I'll go radical: In general the tradition of philosophy is to be the Mother of the sciences, but current philosophy is, by and large, the study of mysteries.

We still are debating a huge swath of traditional questions in which we have not managed to advance one iota. What is the self, how can matter think, what is mind, what's the good, is there only one thing in the universe, do we have free will, etc.

Sometimes we get lucky and manage to bring some of the classic philosophical questions into the arena of empirical research, and then we get a science.

I don't think anybody really knows what's going to happen next. We hear reports that Russia is re-grouping to the eastern parts of Ukraine, so they can focus on those areas. Others say they think Russia is regrouping to launch another assault on Kiev.

Meanwhile, more and more sanctions are being dished out. What the hell's left to sanction? Only gas and oil for the Europeans. If they do sanction that, then Russia will barely have any income left.

The question is, will they mind losing more soldiers for no discernable reason?

Now the Pentagon is saying Ukraine could "win" this war. I think that's highly unlikely, but, they are defending themselves rather well. But as to the future of this, we don't have a clue at the moment.

Sure. Ukraine might be a little different, but I do think that the global response to the pandemic shows how badly we cooperate with each other. Had we a more rational society, we could have finished with this pandemic in a year or so, not having it still raging on.

But you are correct about having to constantly analyze various complex circumstances changing in real time. As mere individuals, the chances of despair are much, much higher than if decisions are done in a large scale manner, which signals to a bigger "amount" of power that one can use to pressure for some kind of change.

But @Xtrix this is not about giving in to despair, per se. It's about looking at the evidence right in front of our face. If the evidence says, we have even less time that previously estimated, and the previous timeline was bad enough, are we just going to lie to ourselves? It's like we have gangrene in our legs, but we won't chop them off because there's still a chance it won't spread or something.

But what I want to stress is that even if we cannot avoid the worse scenario, this doesn't mean we don't try to mitigate the oncoming damages, there has to be stuff we can do to reduce or resist what's coming.

We also have to think, if we do pass the projected deadlines, which seems likely (but not certain - yet), what then? If we give up, despair will creep in. But if we say we've got to keep helping the situation, we'll be called liars for being alarmists.

So it's not easy in any situation.

Sure, but so did every other field.

But they do have more in commons than what one might first think of. In so far as they both study the mind, it is hard to distinguish. Once it gets to therapy or medication, then the differences are more obvious.

Well man, I mean, not too long ago Saudi Arabia was a member of the Human Rights section in the UN. The Council on Human Rights (?) or something like that.

That's extraordinary. I agree with @Bitter Crank that hypocrisy is a built in feature of people and states, but, even here, some examples are quite baffling.

It's best to be an equal opportunity offender when it comes to foreign policy, meaning, call out each state for the crimes it does, while not discounting that some states do much more harm, because they have much more power.

One thing's certain, there are no saints in international relations. There are victims and aggressors, but states all have heavy criminal components.

Civilian killings where? Yemen? Iraq? Other conflict regions we cannot name because the news does not name them? — FreeEmotion

And this can't be stated enough. Yemen is the "worst humanitarian catastrophe" according to the UN.

Afghanistan is starving too.

But we seem to care less about them. It's sad.

On the other hand, it is legitimate to be extra worried about this, because it involves a nuclear power in a very delicate situation. So there's that.

It stirs the passions, quite understandably, but it's very reactionary and does more harm than good. Plus, we seem to have ADHD brains in the West. Remember that Syrian refugee boy who drowned trying to reach Europe? That picture of the boy was massive, but it was forgotten quite quickly.

As you say, this is very, very ugly and one would not be so analytical if we were inside the war, but, what do they expect? Dodgeball?

The point is to stop this, by doing more sanctioning, we are further isolating them.

Hey neomac.

It would be easier and quicker if you just quote whomever. All you have to do is highlight the posters sentence and/or paragraph and click the black "Quote" box, and you'll see that segment quoted in your post.

Fighting a war over a flag is without doubt immoral. — neomac

Like so.

In other news, the UN says:

‘Now or never’ to avoid climate catastrophe: UN

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/4/now-or-never-to-avoid-climate-catastrophe-un

I mean, honestly, I think it's likely game over. Which does NOT mean that we stop doing something to help alleviate the situation, but the timescale is waaaay too tight compared to the lack of commitment shown by many countries. It's tragic.

Evolution is often a "just so" story and is used way too much for higher cognitive faculties. We obviously laugh, but we don't know why it's beneficial for survival, bacteria don't laugh and they survive better than us.

I think it sensible to argue that laughter is a form of alleviating stress and dangerous situations. But if it arose for those specific reasons, as opposed to reasons of bonding or anything else, who can say? It's a great topic.