If my Latin classes memories serve, Eros did end up mating with Psyche, the most beautiful girl in the universe, although she then reported him on Twitter, #metoo.

Structure affects what chemicals can do, and chirality is just a type of structure — punos

Yes, but the point I am making here is that chirality makes no sense at the atomic level, it is an emerging property of molecules. So the laws of chemistry are not derivable from the laws of physics.

How do molecules form? How can atoms form molecules yet at the same time have no effect on the molecules they form. If a molecule does something it is because of the combined effect of the atoms that make it up. There is no molecule apart from atom. — punos

The shape of a particular molecule is not "contained" in or determined by its atoms. That is to say, one can construct several different molecules with the same atomic elements. And this shape is causal, it has consequences. There's a whole science on this, called stereochemistry. Check it up.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for his "lack of understanding of the seriousness of the moment and lack of concern for his people".

The murderer accusing his victims of a "lack of concern". :vomit:

All of these levels of development were produced by the layer directly under it, determined by the rules of that system layer. — punos

This is the only thing in your post that I disagree with (also the animist bit about the universe having desires). In practice, you cannot derive chemistry from physics, and you cannot derive biology from chemistry. Each level of organization had its own rules and ways, that aren't reductible to those of the level below.

This is a very important principle of emergence: the rules too are emerging, not just structures.

It follows that each level of organization is causal in its own way.

The error you are making is very common among materialists: you assume, for no particular reason, that causation only works "from bellow". There is no reason for this assumption, and it can be disposed of.

. In the other case indeterminism: things are undetermined and there is no determination — punos

This is just not true. Indeterminism is fine with determination existing, it just says that not every event is predetermined.

Both indeterminism and determinism are needed for our universe to work the way we see it work. — punos

I agree, and that is precisely the indeterminist view point, which states that some event are not predetermined, and others are. So you are not a determinist after all. Determinists like Harris consider that every single thing that happens was predetermined from the time of the big bang.

free will = the power of acting without the constraint of physical law. — punos

That's defining "free will" as magic. So of course, defined as such it cannot exist.

I personally prefer the term "free choice" (a choice not imposed on you by others, or by circumstances). Or "agency" (the capacity for free choice). I am not comfortable with the notion of "will".

If emergence is not deterministic then where do these consistent structures come from and maintain themselves? — punos

Things don't maintain themselves very well, for the most part. Perfect stability is extremely rare in nature. Things tend to transform after a while. Living organisms tend to die, molecules break up, atoms decay, even stars evolve.

Show me how determinism is not true. Show me a case in which determinism does not hold true. — punos

Quantum mechanics is a scientific theory that's premised on indeterminism. It does permit structures to exist, to my knowledge.

The problem with your view of free-will is that you want to be able to determine your actions apart from the laws of physics and logic which are almost one and the same. — punos

Not at all. The laws of physics may exist in and by themselves (outside of our conception of them, I mean), and if they do, they certainly apply to human beings. But we don't actually know for sure what these laws are. We can only hypothesize them from our observations, reason, and intuition (creativity). That's all. So we cannot say: "the laws of nature preclude free will". We don't know that for a fact.

The exercise of human faculties traditionally tied to free will (observation, reason, creativity) is thus necessary for us to understand the world, or try to. These faculties are fundamental to science. So science cannot logically conclude that human reason is an illusion, for instance, because that would imply that science itself is an illusion.

In this photo released by the Dnipro Region Administration, Municipal workers dismantle a monument of Russian writer Alexander Pushkin in the city centre of Dnipro, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 16, 2022. Ukraine is accelerating efforts to erase the vestiges of centuries of Soviet and Russian influence from the public space by pulling down monuments and renaming hundreds of streets to honor home-grown artists, poets, military chiefs, and independence leaders, even heroes of this year's war. (Dnipro Region Administration via AP)

So you don't believe in emergent layers of complexity? — punos

I do. I just consider emergence as non-determined.

what would convince you that free-will is a false notion? What kind of idea or evidence would you need to at least begin to consider it a viable possibility that free-will is not real? — punos

First, I would need a clear definition of what free will is.

Second, I would not consider as evidence any metaphysical, unprovable consideration, such as determinism. Determinism is not an empirical fact, it's a metaphysical idea, un\provable, so it does not count as evidence of anything.

Thirdly, the proof offered would need to be logically consistent. If it contradicts itself, then it cannot be true. And in my experience, all arguments against free will are self-contradictory in that they postulate that the argument itself is not arrived at through the free exercise of observation and judgment, but determined by sodding atoms and therefore not really an argument.

In Ukraine, the delicate political reinvention of "pro-Russian" MPs

The parties considered too close to Moscow were dissolved after the outbreak of the Russian invasion in February, but their elected representatives kept their mandates and still participate in the life of the Parliament.

By Thomas d'Istria (Kiev) and Faustine Vincent (Strasbourg), Le Monde

The online exhibition is entitled "Pro-Russian parties, fuck off". It gathers a collection of leaflets, calendars and propaganda posters of the different pro-Russian parties that have succeeded one another in Ukrainian political life since the independence of this country, in 1991, until the beginning of the current war, on February 24. The slide show, available on the website of the Chesno ("honesty" in Ukrainian) organization, is a reminder of a time when a "fifth column" influenced Kiev politics, and when the vast majority of Ukrainians did not reject the "Russian world" wholesale.

After more than ten months of war, the political formations that were considered to be vehicles of Russian influence were dissolved by Ukrainian courts. The most important of them, the opposition platform For Life, the first opposition party in the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhovna Rada), did not escape. While some parliamentarians of the former party opted to leave Ukraine, the majority remained, and continues to regularly attend Parliament sessions.

"The party has been banned but the deputies still have the right to sit as long as their mandates have not been cancelled," explains Oleksandr Salzhenko, one of the analysts of the Chesno organization, whose task is to decipher the political life of the Kiev Parliament. According to the country's laws, mandates can only be revoked in case of "loss of citizenship, resignation, death or a court decision.

This sometimes creates absurd situations. For example, Ukrainian MP and oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, co-chairman of the banned party close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was arrested by Ukrainian authorities in mid-April and was at the center of a prisoner exchange with Russia in September, is still officially a member of the Ukrainian Parliament. Other deputies continue to sit in key positions. Nestor Shufrych, who, according to Chesno, has long referred to the conflict in the Donbass as a "civil war" despite evidence of Kremlin involvement, remains today the head of the committee for freedom of expression.

The former deputies of the pro-Russian party have quickly adapted to the new reality of the war. Yurii Pavlenko, 47, says that he and his colleagues first wrote a statement condemning the Russian aggression. Later, they deleted from their party's charter all articles that "mentioned [their] desire for a good-neighbourly relationship with Russia," he says, sitting over a coffee in a Kiev bar. The deputies also voted to exclude a colleague from their party, Ilya Kiva, who had called on Kiev to capitulate on a Russian television channel.

More than ten months have passed. Today, Serhi Hladkoskok is a member of the new parliamentary group Reconstruction of Ukraine. At the end of October, he was in the European Parliament, looking for partnerships and money to rebuild the Kharkiv region. "Our objective is the same as that of President Zelensky, we want to rebuild the country," he told Le Monde. The elected official does not comment on the banning of his former party, and simply recalls that it is not the only one to have been banned after the invasion. "People should not look at the name of the party but what we do. For us, as elected officials, nothing has changed," he says. "We have remained in Kharkiv since the first day of the invasion. People have seen it and remember it, so they trust us."

In Kiev, on the other hand, civil society and some members of parliament remain highly critical of the presence of former elected officials of the largest pro-Russian opposition party in political positions. In recent days, a petition to discuss in the Verkhovna Rada the withdrawal of the mandates of former deputies has begun to circulate. According to Chesno, about fifty votes out of the one hundred and fifty needed to consider the proposal have been collected.

Political analyst Oleksandr Salzhenko remains skeptical. "It is impossible to deprive deputies of their mandates because of martial law, which prohibits amending the Ukrainian constitution and holding elections. There is still the possibility that people will not vote for them in the next elections," says the observer. "But then it will take years."

The emergent layer above this indeterminate layer is where the first fermions appear. Fermions (matter) obey the Pauli exclusion principle and from this the single direction of time due to the progression of cause and effect begins. This is the beginning of determinism and our physical universe. — punos

Seems absurd to me. There is only one universe, and it includes everything there is. Layers are in the eye of the observer.

I'm pretty confident that if a mainstream publication was talking about it, google would put it pretty near the top. — boethius

I'm pretty confident that you have no idea what you are talking about, because the Economist IS a mainstream publication.

certainly would be interesting to see. — boethius

I would be interested in reading the Economist's interview of Zaluzhny, because I hold Zaluzhny as a genius, but wouldn't waste my time looking for someone else's commentary about that interview. I don't see the point.

I don't see much discussion about this interview in Western media — boethius

The Economist is Western media, one of the most visible. Evidently, its competitors, such as the NYT, are not going to talk much about a scoop that escaped them. Why would they advertise for a competitor?

In my experience, American news outlets tend to ignore non-American ones -- it's part of their so-called exceptionalism.

The Economist is ignored by the Western media, really?

The Economist is a US outlet, really?

You guys live in your own world, where your own defecations smell like Channel n°5.

The higher forms are entirely determined by the pattern of the original novelty. — punos

Not clear. What original novelty are you talking about? In a deterministic view, there is no novelty, ever.

To recapitulate your achievements so far: emotional blackmailing, slippery slopes, strawmans, ad hominem, ......... — neomac

He's trolling, which means that he doesn't measure his success by the number of correct, logical points he makes, but by the amount of time you waste here talking to him.

How do you envision this "defanging" and "humbling" taking place? — Tzeentch

You don't have much imagination, do you?

As far as I can tell, regardless of how and when this war ends, post-sanctions-and-war Russia will be far more dangerous to its neighbour's and the West than the previous Russia-we-trade-with, and at the same time Europe will be significantly worse off economically. — boethius

Russia won't be more dangerous after the war, it will be defanged and humbled. Don't you look forward to that?

Time is the most fundamental "thing" in the whole of all there is. Without time existence will cease with no hope of returning. Space by itself can do nothing, energy would not move, information and matter will not form because what makes the whole universe even possible is time. Time is change and movement, it is the "metabolism" of the universe itself. — punos

I like that, but can't fail to notice a contradiction with determinism: if the future is entirely predeterminated, then time does not matter, all its seconds, centuries, and million of years are wasted and wholy redundant. Nothing new ever happens.

If time, on the other hand, is to be a useful, meaningful metabolism for the world, then it must underwrite real change, and support the emergence of radical novelty. Hence undetermined.

The stuff of thoughts are the patterns of electro-chemical activity in the brain, and the waves are byproducts of that activity. — punos

Most probably there are several levels of transmission and cognition: electro-chemical, but also wave-based. And perhaps others yet to be found.

You wouldn't be able to see a picture or video stored in your computer's memory or HD if you opened it up and looked inside. — punos

That may be because it is not there, what is stored is only a technique to reproduce the experience. The seeing makes the image. Otherwise there exist only pixels on a screen. Likewise for any record.

Image Reconstruction From Human Brain Waves in Real-Time — punos

Brain waves are indeed very good candidates for the stuff our thoughts are made of.

Is pondering and thinking not something that goes on in the brain? — punos

You wouldn't be able to see any of it if you dissected a brain.

That's the 100 million dollar question. I would think along some lines close to our intuition of it: we ponder things and take decisions, chosing among limited options of course. Yes we do so in limited time and based on imperfect information but we can manage our time and information basis better; yes we are a product of our culture but we can analyze that and reform our education. So the buck stops at us.

Are you saying that as long as there is no chain of causation we have free-will? — punos

The argument of Harris (Spinoza, really) does not work in an indeterministic world, leaving open the possibility that we may have some agency.

Complete nonsense? — TiredThinker

Most probably. Plants and animals can die if not fed certain elements, like potassium or iodine and scores of others. Starve a plant of any of them and it will die, quickly or slowly depending on the element. This indicates that plants cannot transmutate one element into another. Otherwise they would do so to avoid or manage mineral deficiencies.

What if one were to assume indeterminism. What then? — punos

Then causation is not a chain, and we are not shackled by it.

Sam Harris argues that in the chain of causation the buck does not stop and our "free will" cannot interrupt the determinist chain. — Edmund

That assumes a determinist chain.

To "teach Russia a lesson" - what a joke, but I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Such rhetoric belongs in the children's playground — Tzeentch

It's better than some posters' rhetoric about nuclear weapons, which belongs to death.

Russia needs to be humbled alright, and the Ukrainians are busy doing so.

it is highly unlikely that initiating a nuclear attack has even seriously been considered, — Tzeentch

I agree. Putin is not a fool. He knows he can't do that. Talks of nuke use are rhetorical.

If NATO could end this war "quickly and neatly" they would have already done so. — Tzeentch

Likewise, if Putin could use nukes in Ukraine, he would have already done so.

I highly doubt that Western leaders are willing to enter a protracted land war in Eastern Europe and/or nuclear conflict just to save face for the Americans after they overplayed their hand in Ukraine. — Tzeentch

If Russia uses nukes in Ukraine, the whole Russian army in Ukraine and in the Black Sea will be annihilated by NATO strikes, thus ending the war quickly and neatly. This has been communicated to Mr Putin already.

Marquis de Sade - Wanda's Loving Boy

It's very early
And Wanda sleeps so soundly
Underneath the dim moonbeams

The whole world is dead
When I come up to your bed
Just to scream into your ears

Now listen to your lover:
Is acute pain
Not the highest pleasure?

It's very early
Wanda weeps so loud
I taste her lips with my teeth

And now I realize
How bright
How wild were her eyes

I lift you of the sheets
And stand you up on your feet
To start the odd ceremony

Let our desires lead us
Let the pretense and masks
Stand in for us to hit the mark
Farther and farther and farther
In search of the strongest pleasure

I stand you up on your feet
Oh how thrilling to feed
A sickly bird with one's seed

And now I realize
How bright
How wild were her eyes

It's very early
Wanda sleeps so soundly
In the shelter of my dreams

The last words she spoke
Were getting stuck in her throat
Sorry but I plead not guilty

We had one single thing we could share
Our yearning for unknown pleasures
I was lying to myself
Cos I could do nothing else
When standing facing the mirror

And now I realize
How bright
How wild were her eyes

And now I realize
How blind
How mad it was to try
To reach paradise

I was so pleased
To see Wanda
Down on her knees
I was so pleased
To see Wanda
Groveling at my feet

Considering France's strong economy plus greater military capacity and geopolitical projection (e.g. Africa, Middle East, Asia) than Germany or Italy, Macron's pro-active attitude and ambitious plans for the EU, he clearly had good cards in his hands to be more influential than he's turning out to be. My impression is that's not just fault of bad luck. — neomac

That's fair, I think.

PS: You mentioned France's projection to Africa, Syria, or the Indo-Pacific as assets but in a EU environment, this might not work to France's advantage, because other member states have no interests in those places and in fact are often rather suspicious towards what they see as French neo colonial ambitions. These French military operation oversees are not necessarily seen as positive by other EU nations, more as distractive of the EU predilection for soft-power projection. Europeans like to hide in their NATO-sponsored fortress and send other people in Africa or Asia some money, and diplomats.

May I ask if you live in the EU, or follow EU politics closely?

Irrespective of what the Parisian journalists you quote may opine, there's no way any single nation will lead Europe. Even Merkel with the weight of the German economy behind her and her amazing personal qualities and exceptional length in service, was never an unchallenged leader of the EU.

he’s committing such alienating missteps in an already unfavorable European political and economic environment that his leadership is unfortunately easy to question. — neomac

I don't know what leadership you are talking about. The relationship between France and Germany -- the traditional political engine of the EU -- is currently tense. Until Macron and Scholtz (or their successors) reforge a strong franco-german bound, the EU will be strategically leaderless.

Nobody in Europe considers Macron as a natural European leader. Why should they? Was he elected the president of Europe? Has there ever been a national political figure who was universally accepted as a natural leader of Europe?

IOW, you may be assessing Macron against unreasonable expectations. Pushing your argument one step further, Macron's leadership of planet Earth is also easy to question.... but that may be because he was never meant to be the leader of planet Earth.

this time he’s not “emmerding” the bad citizens for the sake of the good citizens, but “emmerding” his allies for the sake of the enemy — neomac

He's emmerding his allies by reminding them that they will need to make peace with their enemy, that however giddy they are about emmerding the Russians, ultimately they will need to make peace with Russia, so they might as well start a conversation about how this might happen.

I agree with you that his provocative communication technique is often counterproductive, at least initially. It generates controversies and yes, annoyance. But as I said, that's the way he communicates, and it is often effective in a strange, disruptive way. Note the similarities with Trump's style, who basically got (almost) elected by saying all the wrong things.

if Macron doesn’t manage to build a consensus among European partners around his idea of a European Security system which is other than just more NATO, then he’s going to fail his declared objective. So it’s his problem too. — neomac

Yes, that's true and I also agree with your comment about arrogance being counter productive, but I agree with @ssu that such a project has zero chance of working anyway, as long as NATO functions reasonably well. It can only work as an alternative to NATO, and such an alternative will only be considered if Europe has very very good reasons to mistrust the US. Eg if Trump comes back to the White House and aligns his foreign policy with Putin's, or something similar.

Notice, I’m not suggesting some evil intentions on Macron such as pursuing some kind of French imperialism (even though I get why he might be caricatured as a “petit Napoléon” or “petit de Gaulle” and can't discount his pursuit of national strategic interests in Europe and outside), or unreasonable concerns about European strategic autonomy (on the contrary I myself expressed that concern earlier [6]). My point is simply that as the war unfolds Macron’s pushy attitude as a European leader and promoter of European security autonomy is wearing out in support. — neomac

It's just a different modus operandi, which integrates provocation as a means to challenge the status quo. Macron accepts that he needs to ruffle a few feathers in order to get his message across, that nobody listens to Mr Nice Guy. So he regularly says things he 'shouldn't say', and all the commentators then ask "How come he dares to say this?" But I personally think he is right to speak (somewhat) freely and not to be too obsessed about optics. Of course he is still a politician, and still cares about optics, but he is not slave to them.

A true leader is not someone who tells you what you want to hear, but what you need to hear. E.g. on the anti-vacc, he told them what they needed to be told: that their behavior is ultimately antisocial.

In this modus operandi of Macron, it's not his problem if others are annoyed at him; it's their problem. They are only annoyed because somehow, somewhere, he is right; they know it and he knows it. So the annoyance generated is just a proof that the message has been heard.

I note that Mario Draghi said things along similar lines when he was Italian Prime Minister, about the need to make peace with Russia, ultimately. But he said them nicely and softly, and hence no one paid any attention.

"Dictator" is being kind. — Tzeentch

"Cretin" is being kind.