The average American genuinely couldn't give a flip. I think that's true of Trump as well. He's just having fun.

Consider the phrase, "I am politically nonbinary.". Do you discern the speaker's intent differently if they are liberal or conservative? — David Hubbs

They're both.

Some shit we made up might even be true.

The question is, how do you decide which is which? — Banno

This is the problem Socrates talked about when he said every philosopher longs for death so he or she can stand outside of life and finally see it from that vantage point. We don't have access to that place outside of life.

I think even AP philosophers sometimes build castles in the air and offer that some scaffolding will be provided at a later date, for instance, Davidson. In the meantime, his theory of meaning does work, but it works for realism as easily as it does for anti-realism. That underlying question remains unanswered. And it probably always will.

:up:

The situation after a world war would not seem to be the same as a the major economic player defaulting on their debt. Can such a thing happen without consequence? — Janus

It would cause a global economic depression. Marxists were the first to start talking about the social effects of the boom/bust cycles of capitalism. They believed that eventually there would be a depression so severe that capitalism would basically die and be replaced by something else.

Borrowing against increased future prosperity is okay provided future prosperity will indeed be greater, otherwise it would seem to be economic suicide. — Janus

The British were in debt before the Great Depression. That debt was never repaid. The whole global economy just reset after the war. The same thing will eventually happen to the US national debt.

At this point economic suicide would be halting lending. That's basically what the crisis of 2008-2009 was: a hard credit freeze.

If there were real growth in prosperity, then why the need for growing debt? — Janus

Our way of life is dependent on the idea of virtual capital. The banking system as we know it started in Italy. Italian bankers financed wars and from there the financial sector started moving toward the center of the European economy.

It's true that we're basically living beyond our means, but that's how we've become what we are now. That simple idea of debt revolutionized us.

C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image has some pretty neat stuff on how the Gothic cathedral is an image of the medieval cosmos. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I read Otto Von Simpson's book. It made an impression on me. Is Discarded Image something I should read?

According to Elvira Bary, romanticizing criminals is a legacy from the Soviet days for Russians. So like Russian baby boomers and Gen X wouldn't be ashamed of Russian criminals doing their thing. They're doing what they have to to get by. There is zero rule-of-law vibe because they don't have the institutions for that.

I'm curious what younger Russians would think, like their Millennials.

Gothic architecture was pretty amazing (and philosophical). They just lacked the technology to fully see it through.

People close to him say he's conflict habituated. He'll make something to fight against if there is nothing. It's just the way he is...

The Russian elite, as a class, descended from criminals who managed black markets and engaged in illegal manufacturing during the Soviet era. They provided services the government couldn't, so they were tolerated. In the chaos following the fall, they just kept doing the same things, and thereby became the elite. But romanticism about criminality survives in Russia to this day. This is one of many reasons the Russian people are not disposed to revolting. Another is that there's an ingrained belief that the only way to survive as a country is to be an empire, so there's a tendency to see meaning in suffering if it's in the name of empire building, and this suffering isn't expected to ever decrease because the job of defending Russia is continuous.

I think he's saying you could discipline your philosophy purely by semantics, but it's likely to end up "distorted." He might mean that you could end up with a theory that's semantically unafflicted, but which carries a glaring logical fallacy. Obviously the reverse could happen if you just use logic as your discipline: it's logical, but it's language on holiday. We end up using multiple disciplines because experience warns us that we ought to.

Suppose AP never does anything with the questions it raised about the nature of meaning. Will it fall back toward mysterianism? What is the future of philosophy?

So maybe I need to rethink my sense that the analogy can’t help an understanding of dialectic. — Fire Ologist

For explaining dialectics I would ask: if everything in the universe was green, would the word "green" have any meaning? Trying to drive toward the realization that every object of thought appears against a backdrop of its opposite.

It's kind of an obscure point that red is an example of not-green. :grin:

Green is the whole man. — Fire Ologist

Or another thing comes to mind, there's a mystical saying: "The one becomes the two, the two becomes the three, the three becomes the fourth which is the one."

Blue is the 1. We understand blue by comparing it to something else, in this case yellow, so this is the 2. They combine to make the 3, which is green.

But the green is just like the blue in that we understand it by comparing it something else. This is how the 3 becomes the 4th which is the 1. In other words, green implies something other than green, it's grand opposite would be everything that's not green, but in we can pick a stand-in, like red. Now we're back at the 2. Green and red make brown. And the whole thing starts again.

If I invented a normative framework for say, ants, with rules like "ants should protect their queen", "ants should walk in a line", "ants should utilize a caste system" etc. and most ants acted in accordance with it, it must be the case that the ants have an understanding of my normative framework? — goremand

I made a rule that the clouds should eject some water when they hit a low pressure zone. They've been doing a great job.

Let's see. Seems like the child has to be green, so we can make the man or woman, each either blue or yellow. — Fire Ologist

But you are a blend of two different people. If you have siblings, they're other ways to combine the two, just as there are different greens that can emerge from the same blobs of yellow and blue. It just depends on how much blue.

Synergy is the idea of something extra appearing out of a combination, the result being greater than the sum of the parts.

What other areas, things, concepts, experiences, might it depict? — Fire Ologist

Reproduction. Maybe not synthesis, but synergy.

This is a pretty interesting perspective about the future of Russia after Putin.

"Without freedom of speech, we wouldn't know who the idiots are."

Right, it's always been a little intimidating to get a lawyer and claim your rights have been violated. It's dastardly that the executive branch would do this, but other entities do it.

So having neutered Congress by purging it of any non-MAGA members, Trump has now successfully neutered the judiciary, the last bastion against his plainly totalitarian impulses. — Wayfarer

Trump did not neuter the judiciary.

Quite so, and not just with analytic philosophy. The temptation to jump ahead, to overgeneralise, to use the big brush, is great. — Banno

Or make unwarranted assertions.

In the reading, he's talking about theories of meaning that were supposed to be assessed by testing them against language use as we find it. He's saying no fleshed out theories ever appeared, so there's nothing to test. I think the progress he's talking about was just the fleshing out part. People sharpen their wits to express ever more refined versions of the hypothesis and stop there.

Say the professor points to the board with a 2 written on it and says "That's a prime number"

A realist would say the professor referenced a state of the world. Davidson allows us to dispense with propositions and correspondence to understand this. But isn't Davidson's stuff offered as a possibility? There was never any empirical testing, was there?

An anti-realist would emphasize that meaning is use, and truth serves a social function. We don't need to get caught up in trying to understand what the professor is referencing. Reference is kind of poetic anyway. This view is also built on assumptions, and has never been "tested."

I think the conflict is really about two conceptions of the nature of thought.

Thus the construction and assessment of specific truth-conditional semantic theories has almost disappeared from sight in the debate on realism and anti-realism — p.282

This kind of theory would say that a sentence's meaning is its truth conditions, right? I think the basis of that view is intuitive. It might seem that a little ghostly woo explains how sentences relate to truth conditions. Maybe nothing was built because of that?

I think it was quantum entanglement. I'd been curious about which parts of N America will have increased rainfall in 2100. It's the Northeast.

Global temperatures are expected to rise by 2-4 degrees Celsius (3.6-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, according to the Wisconsin DNR.

The US Climate Science Special Report projects that if emissions continue to increase rapidly, the global average temperature will be at least 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 1901-1960 average, and potentially as much as 10.2 degrees warmer, according to Climate.gov.

The United States is projected to experience warming of 3-13 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
This warming will result in more frequent and intense heat waves, with the number of hot days exceeding dangerous conditions expected to increase significantly.

Sea Level Rise:
Sea levels are predicted to rise, potentially by 28-55 centimeters (11-22 inches) compared to current levels, even with carbon neutrality efforts.
The melting of glaciers and ice sheets, as well as thermal expansion of water, will contribute to sea level rise.

Precipitation and Extreme Events:
Changes in precipitation patterns are expected, with some regions experiencing more frequent and intense rainfall and others facing more severe droughts.
The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods, and wildfires, are also projected to increase.

Other Impacts:
Ocean acidification, caused by the absorption of excess carbon dioxide, is expected to continue, posing a threat to marine ecosystems.
The Arctic is projected to experience significant warming and melting of ice, leading to changes in habitats and ecosystems.

The endosymbiotic theory of Lynn Margulis showed that eukaryotic cells arose through bacterial symbiosis, challenging the traditional gene-centric view of evolution and emphasizing cooperation over competition as a driving evolutionary force. — Joshs

It's fascinating, yes. Animal cells probably resulted from archaeal cells that swallowed mitochondria. The theory has been around for a long time that the first complex organisms developed in tidal pools as communities of differentiated cells. I don't think it establishes a priority for cooperation, but yes, it was a turning point in biology when cooperation was highlighted.

Modern biology increasingly views organisms not as discrete individuals but as ‘holobionts’ - integrated communities of host organisms plus their microbiomes. This dissolves the classical boundary between self and environment, — Joshs

This view has been around for decades, but it does not "dissolve the classical boundary between self and environment." It just says that understanding life involves recognizing the concept of a biosphere: a complex set of interdependencies between animals, plants, bacteria, and fungi. You could hardly understand the interactions if you dissolved the boundaries between creatures.

Biology has moved beyond genetic determinism toward understanding development as emerging from gene-environment interactions across multiple timescales. — Joshs

It goes both ways, yes. Life transforms its environment to meet its needs. The environment in turn, transforms genes. The two definitely need to be understood together. Remember that in this, we're looking at the behavior of populations, not individuals. For instance, if we take the wolves out of Yellowstone, the whole environment will change because the wolves' former prey will over consume the vegetation, causing erosion around the creeks, and a loss of habitat for insects, fish, and birds. Just one animal population missing causes the whole scene to change.

But you can take one wolf out of Yellowstone and keep it in a cage. It will be fine. I suspect that what you're doing is trying to take principles about populations and apply them to individuals. It doesn't work that way.

The convergence suggests biology is moving toward what some call a "process ontology" where identity emerges from patterns of relationship rather than essential properties - a view that resonates across these philosophical and scientific frameworks.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ — Joshs

I was driving along one day when all at once, the whole functioning of the circulatory system appeared in my mind at the same time (I'd been studying the heart for a while). It was a stunning vision. It's true that sometimes we get lost in details and can even stray into error from failing to see the bigger picture. This bigger picture is not a philosophical renaissance for biology, though. It's always been there.

The lemon farming anecdote amused me — BitconnectCarlos

That's because there's something wrong with your ability to discern wrong-doing.

but I don't think this is historical, as the Palestinians were displaced from the West Bank, not to the West Bank, in 1967. They largely went to Jordan. — BitconnectCarlos

They came to the West Bank in waves, some of the refugees were living in the West Bank at the time. I'm getting really disgusted by this conversation, so I'm out.

Today’s iron -clad scientific truth will tomorrow’s superstition anyway, — Joshs

This is the lack of flesh I was talking about. My discussion with Pierre-Normand ended up in the same place: a fairly large disconnect between his view and basic biology. Like you, Pierre-Normand said we can take a grain of salt with science, which is fine, just recognize that science is presently very helpful in providing narratives for "an enormous variety of practical" avenues.

Numerous theories of personality and psychotherapy are based on them. — Joshs

That's cool, and you very well may be right, that enactivism is the way forward, but our present biological understanding of organisms actually saves lives on a daily basis. I'm not casting shade on enactivism at all. I'm just saying it's got a ways to go to supplant the scientifically rooted view that presently prevails.

Right. The idea that we only have indirect access to the world through internal representations is a cartesian, reductionist view of emotion, and stands in direct opposition to the enactivist claim that we don’t represent the world via internal schemes but are in direct contact with it by way of our patterns of activity and interaction. — Joshs

I get it, but I think there's a strawman in calling the opposing view Cartesian. I think Robert Rosen is right that biology in its present state is founded on a set of expectations, some of which are apriori. In other words, a little Kant is helpful in understanding what we mean by life. It really isn't Cartesian though. If anything, contemporary biology is a subset of physics.

Frank, I don't remember this conversation where you claimed I laughed. Could you give me a link? — BitconnectCarlos

That would require work on my part. :smile: I told you that when the Israelis forcibly displaced Palestinians from their homes in 1967, many of them went to the West Bank and began lemon farming. The Israelis didn't like the fact that they were surviving, so they diverted the water from their farms. The failed farmers then turned to retail sales in markets, but the Israelis raised taxes on them until they all went out of business. That's how the huge refugee camps started. It's just the truth. Israel created the horrible conditions in the West Bank that led to unrest.

You laughed about the lemons. Please don't redemonstrate your apathy. It's super depressing to hear someone do that.

No, I don't. I think you're misreading me. If you read anger into my posts, that's the reader's error. — BitconnectCarlos

Ok. I guess I just don't get where you're coming from. When I told what Israel did to the Palestinians so that they ended up in refugee camps, you laughed about it, but then you're horrified by the Iranian government. It really seems to me that there's something wrong with your moral compass. Take that for whatever it's worth.

.. Would you agree you have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder? You say more and more outrageous things until someone calls you on it.

The key thing about affect is its character as change of disposition, as a being exposed to the world in a fresh way. That doesn’t seem to be adequately captured by the solipsistic connotations of a mind turning inward towards itself. Affect does the precise opposite, throwing us outside of ourselves by the way it affects us. — Joshs

I was referencing the fact that we model the world and react to the model prior to reacting to the world, but more physiologically, the most powerful driver of emotion is dopamine. Activation of dopaminergic pathways starts within the organism, most fundamentally in architecture contained in DNA.

The relation between affect and cognition has been my thing for a long time, and I’ve collected so much ‘flesh’ for the enactivist view it would make Buffalo Bill proud. — Joshs

I agree that an organism and its environment are intertwined. I don't agree that stasis is an illusion. It's one pole of an opposition. You can't conceive of motion without it.

I don't think there is much flesh connecting any philosophical outlook to an explanation for consciousness because there presently is no explanation for it. All we do is speculate.

Or we could argue that for the most part emotions are the mind interacting with itself. Realizing that has the benefit of a kind of freedom.

I talked to @Pierre-Normand once about embodied consciousness. It's an interesting idea, but far from fleshed out enough to make assertions. You would want to frame it as a possibility that emotion can't be extricated from the organism-environment entity. That's certainly not the only way to view it.

Persia will rise again. — BitconnectCarlos