Sounds like a wonderful future for any species that thrives in such conditions. Not much for humans, and especially any human who like to have some nature left to enjoy. There might be some who want to live in grey boxes, half-suffocating through all the technology used to make life sustaining in these conditions. Like cosplaying astronauts on another planet for thousands of years — Christoffer

Could you share the sources of these kinds of predictions?

I don't think any rational human being in their right mind would prefer any worst case scenario if the option means mild inconvenience right now. — Christoffer

And here is the well known philosophical conundrum. No rational person living today will experience the worst case scenario. That scenario wouldn't come into existence until well after we're all gone. How do we put in place a solution to a problem that our descendants might have? You might say we aren't evolved to handle that kind of problem. We have no experience with it. We don't even know how to approach the question.

What do we gain of not doing anything? — Christoffer

The wise say, "First do no harm." Approaching the problem in a childish, semi-psychotic manner is a recipe for making things worse than they would be otherwise. It's better to start with a sober evaluation of the parameters of the problem. What are the long-range predictions? What sorts of efforts now would actually make a difference in the long run?

It will not "take its course". You think there's an end date to this? — Christoffer

In practical terms, no there isn't an end-date. In strict scientific terms, if we exhaust all available sources of CO2, then yes, the atmosphere's CO2 level will return to present day levels in about 100,000 years, with the cost of acidic oceans. The climate will go through an extreme spike in temperature that will last for a few thousand years. This is per David Archer, although I haven't seen him update his figures to account for fracking capability, so it may be off.

If we continue, the temp is going to rise further and then it's pretty much bye bye in a couple of centuries. — Christoffer

There are no scientists predicting that the human species won't survive the worst case scenario. Will civilization as we know it survive it? We don't know.

Phenomenology-wise it would be a collection of experiences starting in infancy, probably diverging significantly around puberty. Some of it is imposed, some of it one actively seeks out.

Maybe it isn't really one concept. It's a fusion of ideas, some related to biology, but in some cases male and female are used sort of metaphorically. In other words gender and sex are like a psychic lightning rod, pulling in whatever clouds of charged air happen to need expression. So in one generation blue is feminine, in the next it's masculine.

Each person is responsible for his or her own behavior.

Partly wrong in that a Wittgenstein sentence, such as "snow is white", does correspond with the reality of the world. The Tractatus is basically setting out a correspondence theory. — RussellA

There are a lot of interpretations of the TLP, changing in character over time. I don't think any of the various interpreters can claim to have more sway than the others. Witt is so in the category of food for thought.

I came to the TLP from having been immersed in Schopenhauer. It's really obvious that he's responding to Schopenhauer, especially chastening him about getting transcendent in the speculation department.

So I see what you're talking about, but I don't think he's talking in terms of a correspondence that a realist would approve of.

more in a bit

For me it's a liberal left version of mysticism. — fdrake

For others it might be about living in a country with an outsized homicide rate. That's not about misogyny though. It's just a cultural thing.

A believer in Transcendental Apriosis is a Rationalist who proposes that a solitary thinker using pure reason can understand reality. — RussellA

I think the point of the TLP is to show that when we talk about "understanding reality" in some rarified sense, we're doing something with language that it's not designed for. What sorts of things go on beyond the realm of language? There's nothing to say about that.

In other words, Witt wasn't trying to say that consciousness excludes anything beyond the word circus. He was just pointing out that going on and on about things that are beyond language is foolish.

"Noesis (a non-discursive, non-linguistic, reflexive grasp of truth) is impossible." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is that line actually in the TLP?

Not only Wittgenstein, but many modern philosophers don't accept the concept of Transcendental Aprioris, of which noesis is a part. — RussellA

I don't think he would accept or reject it. He would say we have no way of definitively answering the question.

I am just pointing out that Wittgenstein starts from assumptions about the nature of truth and knowledge that were common to his niche — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could you expand on that? What assumptions about the nature of truth and knowledge do you think he started with?

So are you claiming there's some foundation to knowledge? What is it?

Doesnt Chinese philosophy say men are externally yang, but internally yin. Same with women. What you see is yin, but they're internally yang.

If "they" are still not sure how life survived at all in that mass extinction then it shows that "they" are lacking knowledge and are exaggerating. — Agree-to-Disagree

The riftia or tubeworm appeared 35 million years ago. The mass extinction known as Snowball Earth was 700 million years ago.

Cool quote.

I've never had the impression that people can choose hinge propositions. I know someone earlier mentioned the rules of chess, where you can't play the game without assuming them. In the context of the game, you can't doubt them without exiting as a player. But life isn't a game one can exit. You don't have a choice.

Maybe you could be confronted with something new, as when the Zulu man is shown a map, and grasps long range distances as he'd never done before. The way he sees space has been altered. But he can't go back to the way it was before.

So I'd say hinges are too bound up in living as a human to doubt them. Is that how you see it?

If you take the sentence as saying that it is in English, then you cannot also doubt that it is in English. — Banno

If you assume p, you can't simultaneously doubt p.

This is the delusional and sick ideas that a person for whom power has gone to the head can dream about. — ssu

I think you need to focus on something else for a while.

Okay, I will reword my question to make it easier to answer.

Are bacteria and archaea alive?

Are the organisms that are found around hydrothermal vents alive? The types of organisms that are found around hydrothermal vents include giant tube worms, clams, mussels, crabs, and certain fish. — Agree-to-Disagree

Yes. And?

This is the least populated state in the US, Wyoming:



You can see why we're so desperate to have Greenland. It's too crowded here!

What is your definition of life? — Agree-to-Disagree

I don't think there is one.

Yesterday I was at an intersection and I saw a hand written sign that said, "It says of the people, by the people, for the people."

I thought to myself, hey, somebody gets it.

:up:

Ahhh! :lol:

Stressful times I guess. Not as bad as the pandemic though, right?

FIne. Perhaps he did not do violence, so much as changed the subject. — Banno

I don't think he changed the subject. Had Kripke discussed it with Witt, I think Witt would have laughed and said, "How about that?"

And I think mine the more standard response. — Banno

I don't think so.

Not unlike Kripkenstein. — Banno

I disagree that Kripke does violence to Witt. I don't see why you would say that.

It's all going to hell, man. Beans are spilling all over the place!

During the Permian extinction there was so much crap in the atmosphere that the partial pressure of O2 went from 35% all the way down to 12%. It's 21% now, and that's what we need to survive. If the PO2 went down to 12% again, most living things on land and in the oceans would die.

A mass extinction is like this: imagine a car that goes through a lot of hardship, but keeps running. Finally a point is reached where a critical component of the engine falters and the whole engine stops. During a mass extinction, there's a fundamental breakdown in the mechanics of the biosphere. This has happened several times. There's one mass extinction where they're still not sure how life survived at all.

The palace economies in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant were waning in the late Bronze Age, being replaced by primitive market economies led by private merchants or officials who owned private businesses on the side.[citation needed] The last holdout and epitome of the palace system was Mycenaean Greece which was completely destroyed during the Bronze Age collapse and the following Greek Dark Ages. — wikipedia

If you really want to read about any of this, anything by Moses Finley is good stuff.

Can you actually make that argument rather than asking us to assume it? — unenlightened

In the Bronze Age, the most important commodity, food, was not private property. Land wasn't. People worked in the fields and brought their produce into the temple to be divided by the priests. It's called a temple economy. There was no free market. How patriarchal were they? We can only speculate. In the opening scene of the epic of Gilgamesh, the people of Ur are praying to the Sun god to help them because Gilgamesh, their king, is making all the men work hard, and he's having sex with all the women. The Sun god hands the problem off to a female divinity, the fertility goddess. She makes a man out of clay and sets him roam like a wildman. In due course, the wildman is tamed by the temple prostitute. This wildman eventually becomes the best friend and homosexual lover of Gilgamesh.

So we have a bisexual king, the one who initiates wildmen into a civilized state is a prostitute. One of the most important deities is female. In real life, the leader of the temple, where the food is divided up, is the King's daughter. I'm not suggesting that women had equal rights in this society. I doubt anybody had any rights per se. But this is not patriarchy as we know it.

The conditions you describe for the genesis of patriarchy, where private ownership drives men to know who their offspring are, didn't exist until the Iron Age. Our knowledge of the Iron Age is not foggy. We know it pretty well, and though a case could be made for what you described, if would be fairly flimsy.

All we know is that as the dust cleared from the Bronze Age collapse, patriarchy had become normal. From early accounts, we know this was a very dangerous world to live in. No one travelled around. You just stayed close to your clan.

So maybe ownership played a part. Maybe patriarchy became the dominant cultural scheme for other reasons. I'm speculating just as you are.

@Tobias
I have a hypothesis for you. Patriarchy offered a survival advantage to societies by providing strong family units. In societies where neoliberalism became rooted, priorities shifted from the well-being of families (which was important after the depression and WW2) to the welfare of financial institutions. This created a sense of vulnerability in the labor pool. At the time, fighting the power of unions was seen as paramount to economic stability. But years later, large holes began to appear in the social safety net for some, particularly Americans.

Now look at JD Vance, the vice-president of the US. His outlook was shaped by his childhood experiences with the disintegration of the family unit. His mother was a drug addict. He was raised by his grandmother. He places a lot of importance on the welfare of children. He might fit into a larger conservative framework that probably is a little retrogressive.

Though we may be facing challenges in the domain of the male persona, blaming the political shift on this psychological issue would be to fail to see the tangible problems causing stress. What nobody outside the US seems to want to digest is that immigration control and tariffs are potentially beneficial to American labor. There's a real problem that this administration has done more to fix than generations of left-center politicians. In other words, I'm pushing for looking at the real problems on the table.

Patriarchy is one of a number of social schemes. The British Celtic and Navajo schemes are examples of alternatives. Suppose patriarchy won out by a kind of natural selection? It offered some advantage? If that's true, and we're now transitioning to some other scheme, we might want to think about what we're losing when patriarchy declines. Perhaps it's not a matter of egos, or ownership. Maybe it was about strong family units that gave some kind of robustness to society. The Iron Age was a hard time to be alive, so maybe that selected for patriarchy.

If that's true, then it may be that moralizing about it is irrelevant. If we escaped patriarchy, it's because conditions allowed creativity that didn't exist for our forebears.

I don't know what you don't know. If I have said something you disagree with, based on the article you linked, then perhaps you can clarify, taking account of that DNA evidence that I think supports and justifies my position. — unenlightened

The Celts were as civilized as anybody else in the Roman world. Virgil was Celt.

I don't know. In Bronze Age societies, the high priestess was usually the king's daughter. The temple would house women who had sex for a living. The character who transforms the wildman Enkidu into a civilized person is a temple prostitute.

I think the patriarchy being talked about in this thread is more Iron Age. A whole other civilized world existed before the Greco-Roman world we know so much about. I wouldn't jump from hunter-gatherers to the Iron Age, in other words.

Apparently the British Celts didn't have male dominated societies.. How would you account for cultures like their's?

Pretty much. — Banno

Couldn't I know that P without ever communicating about it to anyone?

Present a true sentence? Do you mean make an assertion?

Territorial expansion is something very close to heart for him indeed. — ssu

Sure. Who wouldn't want a massive ice sheet?

Are you trying to say there is no such thing as knowing that?