unenlightened

I think Putin thought the same about Zelensky. A puppet he could knock over in a few days.Do you think Russia began this prepared for a long war of at...

I think it is a reasonable supposition that Putin thought he was attacking a comedian of a leader, and could do what he liked in Ukraine at little cos...

We have been lied to and manipulated so much that trust has been lost in politicians, scientists, and the media. It is impossible now to trust authori...

Of course there are problems with that. We are used to politicians lying and when caught in a lie, shrugging it off or doubling down (to hell?). Yes I...

Lovers of wisdom need to banish bullshitters from their midst. This is a moral imperative.

You. I answered the question first, and then criticised it. Do you think that repeating it makes it more cogent?

If you maintain that it is never possible to distinguish truth from lie, you have already given up on communication, and there is no answer for you. Y...

The lesson of the fascist movement that led to WW2 is a moral lesson, which has been forgotten. With this in mind, it is certainly naive and imprudent...

A bad faith poster, basically, cherrypicking evidence to support a position they never explicitly declare, and so never have to defend or concede. A t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5TiUhhm7cQ

I bet those melting mammoth carcasses really honk. That must be why the Russians have names like Pukein and Vomitoretch. Edit: we are still allowed to...

Always happy to be someone's significant other. :joke:

Look carefully at the graph you posted, and you will see that the previous peak temperature was about 125,000 years ago and was just a tad higher than...

Yes. And since humanity is making speedy progress towards environmental catastrophe and self-destruction, a bit of regression might be prudent.

Is this a learning by which you might be changed? Are the relationships you have on this site ever such as your ideas about yourself are changed? I af...

No one wants to give up their home, and especially not under coercion and with no compensation. But in the situation that prevails, it would not be ex...

It's so difficult to be even handed. The fact is that Israel has some land, and Palestine has none. Palestinians need some Palestine. One has to start...

I had one of those, but the wheels fell off.

Blimey, that sounds almost sensible! Can't wait. Can wait actually, can't do anything more productive though, unfortunately.

Or daft? My 14 pages are actual posts I thought better of posting. but if you spend any time thinking about it, a draft gets autosaved and even if you...

I've got 14 pages of em. How many drafts to the breeze is it? I think its 4 breezes to the windbag.

Yes.computers manipulate information; we provide the meaning. The billionth decimal iteration of pi has a value between 0 and 9, and it means nothing ...

Thanks. I'm sympathetic to @"Wayfarer"'s difficulty though, it has taken me years to really reconcile Shannon information theory with the entropy of p...

You're right, but wrong about this. the order is pre-specified as "a square of pixels 100 by 100 each either black or white" . So any combination what...

No, there is perfect order, like a blank piece of paper. Perfect order, and no information. The singularity before the bang. Information is written on...

No it isn't the case. What is the case is that you are not interested in the information, but in the patterns and orders. But if you happened to be a ...

Yes, It seems like a necessary truth that omniscient beings cannot learn. It's not my theory. It's Shannon's. I understand this claim, it seems intuit...

Oxymoronic warning. Please don't make stuff up about entropy (or God) unless you really do understand it. Knowing Euclid's definitions and axioms does...

Have to declare an interest, in that I am in the middle of a thread on this book; nevertheless I commend to you strongly Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nat...

Sorry for the very long quote. Bateson does here what the behaviourist refuses to do, which is to consider the dog's view of things. By comparing the ...

The explanation of the functioning of human vision is worth reading in its entirety, but here is just the punchline, that illustrates the principle th...

I think the term 'natural selection' was 'selected' in the first instance to provide a believable alternative to "Chosen by god" or "Designed by God" ...

That rather depends on who (if anyone) decides to fuck with you, and how.

For my own convenience, here are the bullet points from the article, and some comments from the authors and some from me 1. EG. Dynamite is fairly sta...

"What more?", is the question I am asking. I'm suggesting basically that it is merely an aspect of entropy:- order decreases <—> information increases...

I must be young at heart then at 71 and three quarters. You do know that Deacon is a satirical journalist don't you? Take what he says with a pinch of...

Of all your attempts to undermine the purposes of this thread, this is undoubtedly the most mean-spirited, spiteful, and useless. To set one generatio...

You can always tell the goodies from the baddies by the colour of their hats. Plus the goodies always win because God is on their side. So we know the...

If one assumes that any phenomenon begins as simply as it possibly can be, complexification is the only way to go. So I am wondering how this new law ...

Them? or Us? That is, are they that engage in othering a problem for us who do not, or is it the other way round? No, actually, don't even try and ans...

Maple syrup is a cruel exploitation of innocent trees, that cannot run away from the humans bleeding them half to death year after year. Is there no l...

And it's been downhill ever since. Thusly, our inheritance tells us to avoid hubris and the pretence of very stable genius. Do not pass Go, do not cal...

I think it is potentially useful to recognise what oneself and everyone else is doing with our lives and our deaths. It might be possible to do it les...

If Hitler says you are a Jew or a queer or an imbecile or a Jehovah's Witness, it doesn't matter what you think or who you other; off to the extermina...

The other is at least our moral inferior, but at the same time an existential threat. Both aspects are essential for our unity; without the other we f...

What wiki illustrates is that there is a coinciding of religion, ethnicity, and economic group. Conflict Sociology suggests that the more these bounda...

If I got bombs, I'd rather use bombs and not risk my own skin. If I got guns I'll use them; if all I got is piano wire, I'll throttle you with that, b...

I ain't afraid of a bunch of crooks that can't even keep the tabloids from filming their lunches. Next week they'll be appearing on "I'm a Super-crimi...

The wiki page has sections on mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, as well as arthropods, and a nice picture of a beetle claw. They leave out the cla...

... to rhyme with "Farage", and "garage" as the cockneys pronounce them.