I was expecting nothing less from you Banno!

eligion
woman
pesimism
depression
atheism
cause — Banno

Let me take a stab at it:

1. Woman: A certain minimum level of the hormones estrogen/progesterone in your brain's chemical milieu.

2. Pessimism: Something similar to the above but involving very different (neuro)chemicals.

3. Depression: This, I'm certain, you already know to be a deficiency of the neurochemical serotonin.

4. Atheism: Possibly, there's a skepticism molecule and it's interacting with a logic molecule. :grin:

5. Cause: Correlation coefficients of unity/1. Of course you knew that!

What sayest thou, o wise one?

Beyond good and evil is to ignore life, the ability to feel pain, and, most dishearteningly of all, consciousness. God, a mathematician, has laid down the mathematical laws of nature that don't differentiate animate from inanimate, can feel pain from cannot, conscious from not conscious, good from evil. God is, in that sense, supra-morality! God isn't dead (yet)!

Well, through air, the path is not a parabola actually. But it looks like one. The very concept of a parabola follows from math. There are no parabolas in nature. The water rays shot from fountains resemble parabolas but before we invented them, it was nowhere to be seen. They are imaginaries. Of course some natural phenomena have mathematical shapes, but do they have them because they have to follow it? — Haglund

To me, the structure of nature is perfect (mathematical) and that, to my reckoning, is (true) beauty.

What we believe is beauty though is, on that view, imperfection.

I don't think that's correct. But scientists and philosophers both have long noticed the uncanny relationship between maths and the world, going back to the Pythagoreans (and probably before.) I've read a couple of books on it, Mario Livio - Is God a Mathematician? being one.

My view is that in some fundamental sense, number is real. Not that there aren't imaginary numbers and imaginary mathematical systems, as there surely are - but that in grasping mathematical truths, you're grasping something real, not subjective, not a product of the mind. Loosely speaking that is called mathematical platonism and it's a favourite subject of mine, although not being highly proficient at maths is a handicap. — Wayfarer

All I can say, based on my own analysis, for what it's worth, is that maths is a part of reality. Math, unlike a unicorn, the classic example of something unreal, describes how real-world objects like stones, rockets, planets, stars, and galaxies behave. That, in my book, qualifies as real enough!

Intriguingly, consciousness doesn't seem to matter to math. Throw me off the balcony of a 4^th floor apartment and I'll follow the laws of gravity just as a stone would if chucked from the same height. My consciousness isn't part of the equation that describes my fall, as if it didn't exist at all! I find that quite disheartening, don't you?

If God were a mathematician, His mathematical laws don't distinguish humans from lumps of rock or from anything else for that matter. Odd that! It makes me wonder about ethics!

Truth be told, Nietzschesn übermenschen are actually a reversion to the animal state from which humanity had just about managed to look past in the last 3k years or so. In other words übermesnchen do transcend humans, but not in the way you think. It's actually regression rather than progression. Didn't the Nazis, the supposed heirs of Nietzschean ideoloogy, behave rather like brutes/troglodytes?

The parabola form is traced out by the stone. It's not there before. — Haglund

Time, I believe, is not relevant to the issue. We're describing, loosely speaking, behavior of matter & energy and that, for all intents and purposes, is mathematically defined/constrained. A stone, given the laws of physics, must trace a parabolic path through the air.

that's a matter of taste. — Haglund

Yep, math is/should be subjective!

you have just taken as gospel the very thesis whose credibility is in question, namely that every cause precedes its effect. — Bartricks

derived from empirical evidence and it's held up to scrutiny. — Agent Smith

This has already been referred to but it's always worth another mention, https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html — Wayfarer

:up:

Can you parse Haglund's claim that a parabola "follows" a stone?

In my humble opinion, that's a matter of taste. Does the thrown stone follow the parabola or the parabola the stone? What comes first, the parabola or the trajectory? — Haglund

In what sense does a parabola follow a stone?

Try it the other way round: A stone traces a parabola. It makes complete sense.

Question begging — Bartricks

How so? I'd say the principle that causes must temporally precede effects is derived from empirical evidence and it's held up to scrutiny.

Maslow territory. — Ansiktsburk

Although, prima facie, Maslow's hierarchy of needs makes complete sense - it jibes with our intuitions - I found out it has many critics. That said, the mistakes it supposedly makes doesn't seem to amount to a death blow if you catch my drift.

As regards the OP, all I can say at this moment is people who're suffering (unfulfilled needs in Maslow's world) simply don't have the time or resources to think (well) like, say, a well-paid professor of philosophy in a university somewhere.

It's a vicious cycle as I once pointed out: suffering $\to$ can't think $\to$ suffering $\to$ can't think...

As far as I can tell, nature seems to follow mathematically describable laws. I think you've got it back to front!

Simultaneity in re causation is actually a fallacy: cum hoc ergo propeter hoc. The cause must always be anterior to the effect.

Hidden within those intricate folds are the secrets of the universe. — jgill

Well, maybe not. :sad: — jgill

:chin:

Whac-A-Mole?

Truth pops up randomly in an epistemic, to borrow a mathematical term, field...sometimes at an opportune moment (an example) and at other times at very inconvenient times (in flagrante delicto).

:ok:

:ok:

What you say fits like a glove with Nietzsche's Darwinian bent: Evolution wouldn't have made x pleasurable and y painful if it weren't good. Add to that the fact that evolution is about "survival of the fittest" which Nietzsche thought meant "survival of the powerful" and what we have are the perfect ingredients for a might is right philosophy. Übermensch indeed! It's an irony that Nietzsche was sick, in mind and body, as per records.

For if the light of reason uncovers disturbing truths, one solution is to turn off that light. — Art48

I can relate to that but only as a disinterested party; I neither wish to be the light nor the agent that turns it off. Point worth noting though is that evil, whatever the hell it is, prefers or rather hides in darkness. The long and short of it, yeah, where there's illumination there could be suffering/pain but rest assured wickedness/cruelty will need to relocate, pronto!

Beyond good and evil could be rephrased, salva veritate, as beyond hedonism. Of what practical use would hedonism be to a denizen of hell? It would only intensify/aggravate/worsen the situation for one who resides in jahanam to think about pleasure (good) and suffering (evil), oui? Perhaps for Nietzsche, earth is ruled by Satan!

I don't know. He probably was familiar with it, being a well-educated urbane sophisticated crackpot. Were you planning on suing Freud's estate for copyright infringement of Socrates' ideas? — Bitter Crank

:rofl: I wish I knew how, but the resemblance...it's hard to ignore.

Freud's psychodynamic system is too rococo to be tied to any single source. I don't think he cooked up the oedipal conflict and penis envy after reading Sophocles' plays. Besides, he was wrong about penis envy. Men have penis envy, not women. (see the scholarly work of M. Python, Biggus Dickus) — Bitter Crank

:lol: Freud's psychological theory revolves around sex, run-of-the-mill and deviant, and there's merit to it if you look at from a Darwinian (evolutionary) perspective: survival is about reproductive success! :chin:

Man is something to be surpassed — Jack Cummins

Yep. This idea is very much like how a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly i.e. the larva transcends itself from simply being an eating machine (I believe it eats more than its body weight in leaves per feeding session) into something that has beautiful wings and can fly. We too are meant to leave behind what passes for humanity (re Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari) and go, as they say in Star Trek, where no man has gone before.

You see the same sentiment being expressed by Maslow (Maslow's hierarchy of needs) - the tip of the pyramid of "necessities" is, if memory serves, TRANSCENDENCE!!!

Blues music is an aesthetic device of confrontation and improvisation — 180 Proof

:fire:

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade? :chin:

To disrupt one rhythm, one introduces imposes nothing but another rhythm, si? Play along, dance to someone else's tune, oui?

Why would self creation be impossible then? What's the asymmetry? — Haglund

There's no causal paradox. Can I write an executable that deletes itself? Ask a coder. However, a program that writes itself, unheard of!

:ok:

Emotional Intelligence (Ability Model):

1.Perceiving emotions – the ability to detect and decipher emotions in faces, pictures, voices, and cultural artifacts—including the ability to identify one's own emotions. Perceiving emotions represents a basic aspect of emotional intelligence, as it makes all other processing of emotional information possible.

2. Using emotions – the ability to harness emotions to facilitate various cognitive activities, such as thinking and problem-solving. The emotionally intelligent person can capitalize fully upon his or her changing moods in order to best fit the task at hand.

3. Understanding emotions – the ability to comprehend emotion language and to appreciate complicated relationships among emotions. For example, understanding emotions encompasses the ability to be sensitive to slight variations between emotions, and the ability to recognize and describe how emotions evolve over time.

4. Managing emotions – the ability to regulate emotions in both ourselves and in others. Therefore, the emotionally intelligent person can harness emotions, even negative ones, and manage them to achieve intended goals. — Wikipedia

More at Emotional Intelligence (Wikipedia)

I have no idea whether something could create itself i.e. self-creation is a rather difficult idea to wrap my head around, but I can tell you this, with what might seem as an inordinate amount of certainty, self-destruction is possible and has been documented (re suicide and the related self-destruct button installed in spaceships seen in fiction.

As for the cause and effect existing simultaneously, it fails to fulfill a criterion for causality viz. that the cause must temporally precede the effect.In your ball & cushion example, the ball exists before the depression in the cushion.

Understandable. But what if I do not want to pray at all? I no longer believe in future or luck either fortuna. I think life tend to be difficult and painful for us, full of uncertainty.
This uncertainty make us to find different paths to survive. You choose religion but I do not choose anything — javi2541997

Different strokes for different folks? :chin:

I'm not advocating for prayer, intercessory or otherwise. I haven't come across evidence that prayer is effective. Nevertheless, it does provide some comfort or, as someone told me, peace of mind and that can be huge advantage in certain high-octane situations like battles. Believing god's on one's side can work wonders insofar as a soldier's morale goes.

Anyway, back to the home page of miracles & the divine, what I find interesting is how thin the line is between improbability and impossibility with respect to divine miracles. People are willing to attribute the former to God, but are in two minds as to whether god can make the impossible possible and actual (vide the stone paradox). God, on this view, seems rather weak, unimpressive, and disappointing.

Lives have been both immiserated and enriched by Luck or Fortuna.

Chance favors the prepared mind. — Louis Pasteur

In other words...we can eliminate Fortuna and her whimsies. Not completely though and therein lies the rub. We must always pray for God's blessing.

Freud — Bitter Crank

Do you see any truth in the claim that Freud's theory of mind (Id, Ego, and Superego) was a ripoff of Socrates' Chariot Analogy?

If one contends that miracles aren't least likely occurrences, then they lose their value as proof of God.

I'm partial to the definition of a miracle as an improbability. God works via manipulation of chance. In fact, I find myself gravitating towards the idea that God is none other than Fortuna (Lady Luck).

Jesus is science. God, the Father, supposedly, incarnated in the physical plane, the domain of science, as Mary's son.

As for art, Yeshua was not known for painting or sculpture, but I remain convinced enough that he was a good actor and was a wordsmith in his own right. As a subject of art, however, he had no equal, at least not in medieval Europe.

I did not go berserk. Being rational is normal. — Jackson

:ok:

The rule following paradox if a true paradox would imply that every possible pattern (rule) exists in any given sequence of word usages.

For causality, what this means is every cause-effect relationship we discover is compatible with all possible such relationships. So, if the sun doesn't rise tomorrow or Russell's chicken is beheaded the coming day, these, in no way, contradict the preceding sunrises or early-morning bird feed.

I'd say it boils down to statistics, specifically the quality of the sample.

Moreover, mathematicians, it's said, don't just stop with finding patterns, they're also in the business of explaining why there is a pattern in the first place.

Signing off...

It's said that the great Isaac Newton, after having worked on the problem of celestial motion, demonstrated i.e. proved that the orbits of heavenly bodies had to be elliptical. In other words, the mathematical relationship between relevant parameters implied/necessitated the oval shape of their orbits. Isn't this a case of causal necessity? Put simply, the math caused the orbits to take a certain shape, in this case an ellipse. Doing this for all cause-effect is going to be harder, but Newton did manage to get the ball rolling, oui?

Seems he had an encounter with the gods — Haglund

:smile:

:up:

:lol:

:up:

You are not referring to Higgs boson, which took the nickname "God particle", are you? — Alkis Piskas

No, I'm not. My point is that God's a hypothesis, scientifically speaking. In that sense then it can never be proven true although it can be considered provisionally true via experimental evidence. However, it can/should be falsifiable (re Karl Popper & The Problem of Evil).

In my humble opinion, the Theory of Evolution has a lot of potential.