The blind man and the elephant seems an apt comparison. Humans can only know what is given, and that given is reality for humans. When other humans have similar experiences and when mathematics provides information concerning the structure of reality as knowable there is knowledge of the reality that humans encounter being formalized. That is pragmatic and useful.
Explorers could ever only discover phenomena and not noumena. They may use an associahedrons to find the scattering patterns and models of new particles yet not see with their own eyes the quantum realm of fermions. https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2024/10/associahedra_in_quantum_field.html
The Universe itself may be ungrounded; suspended in nothingness without boundaries, rhyme or reason for being except the will of God; or for unbelievers postulating a Cod of the Gaps to escape quantum fields perhaps expanding while dispersing with entropy and salvation.
Uncertainty and gaps; spacing intervals, being and non being, form and substance plus colors in some light allow the common experience for humanity. Human reality could be inside a kachinka doll or recursive puzzle box with greater and lesser realities.
People need understand first what is given and proximal and perhaps non-local too sometime and speculate with metaphysics from the known; like Plato’s troglodyte prisoners, with logical inference, science and with whatever revealed knowledge from a superior being may be provided.
A question; how is an 'absolute' truth different from a truth? Kierkegaard hated Hegel's use of the word absolute. He thought it wasn't meaningful. Maybe he would have used Hume's metaphysical non-sense shears on it.
What I know of the Higgs field, massless particles beyond it, a pluralized unified field with finite content and non- locality brings me to a point of reserve and a little optimism about increasing understanding of the evident. If mind interacts with shaping experience there might be an order to.that as well. Standard forms seem like an ordinary presentation of the known.
I like some of the explanations for how optical organs developed finding light. So for whatever reason bodies that are entanglements of fermions configured themselves within overlapping fields derived from a unified field and sought energy. Sentients in time thought about the quanta that comprise substance then became skeptical about what reality is.
Entangled in the Higgs field like the goat in the bush that substituted for Isaac as a sacrifice, the question arises of the extent that observation collapses the wave function of elements comprising the observed since non- locality was confirmed. Can one have an organic naive reality simultaneously with one viewed more from a quantum relativity paradigm in which mind is determining much of what it observes simply because it observed. Can that be consistent with organisms just inputting energy in a natural order. Do fire ants eating meat stop biting if one sleeps?
Bishop Berkeley's ideaism criterion remains possible even within a concurrent natural order. The Higgs field phenomena may be contingent to an unknown extent. Ideaism on a quantum, non-local form is ponderable.
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The bottom 50% of Americans have 2.6% of the nation’s wealth. Wealth inequality does create plutocracy, yet few realize. Capital increases much faster than labor wages. Of course Biden did absolutely nothing about it. What does matter though is that the poorest 10% just haven’t got much of a way to escape poverty, and that should be easy to solve. Most Americans just say to ‘get a job’, without comprehending what the challenges are. Keeping illegal aliens out should create a few more jobs at labor ready when the supply of under the table labor dries up.of
Regardless of the distribution of wealth inequality it should be a national priority to relieve the most poor 10% of the population from dire poverty. There will always be those that cannot get hired to a decent job for myriad reasons; ugly, uneducated, ex-felon, persecuted, old, sickly etc. It is cruel in the rich modern economy where the median income of the bottom 50% is $51,000 per household to not relieve the most poor. Fifty thousand is itself a different social class than those living on fewer than annually $10,000.
It should be made impossible for any American to have less than $10,000 annually to live on. If the most poor were relieved the nation would be a more decent society with the most cruel and even sadistic aspects of capitalism expunged. Palaver about redistribution and communism for tax increases on the rich could be allowed to fade. If the majority don't mind having just 2.6% of the wealth that would be their concern. The most poor just never appear on the political radar screen of anyone in politics.
Joe Biden has done everything he can to stop President Trump from bringing an end to the Ukraine-Russia war. He has arranged for war to continue through the next Presidential election in 2028 if possible. N.A.T.O. members will take up the slack if Trump stops sending weapons to Ukraine.
One shouldn't underestimate Europe's will to make self-destructive political choices; they are idiots rather than peace makers or pragmatists As at the end of WW 2 the USA will need to take the retards under it's armpit and lead it to prosperity and health while the mutt resists the bath.
Old Europe and N.A.T.O. is composed of numerous small, formerly imperial nations that sought global colonies. After Bill Clinton it began to expand in number growing to become somewhat of a monster in size. It is as if dozens of Chihuahuas could unite to become a big dog with the fierceness of a chihuahua. The dog yet has multiple personalities; some in paranoia, some with imperial ambition, and has become a potential threat to the United States directly and indirectly. perpetrating further conflict with Russia may incite World War Three. Joe Biden has trained N.A.T.O. to expect the U.S.A. to be Europe's bimbo/lesbo enforcer doing its bidding. Americans in the media would go along with further war against Russia until the world is incinerated so they could appear to be patriotic in sycophancy with imperial ambitions.
President Trump will need to negotiate with Europe simultaneously with Russia and Ukraine to stop the war. N.A.T.O. will seek to create a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution circumstance to force a full N.A.T.O. attack including the U.S.A. on Russia before a peace settlement is made. Peace should be a 50-50 value division of Ukraine with Russia, an end to tariffs and sanctions on both countries and reconstruction of Ukraine paid for by England, France and Germany.
There should be a tax free DMZ along the shared border that is five miles wide to encourage trade and catalyze reconstruction. Sanctions should be placed on N.A.T.O.embers in Europe so they don’t receive U.S. fuel supplies or natural gas until they end hostilities with Russia. The world needs peace now and a recovering economy morphing into environmental economy for a more verdant planet.
I am very cool on archetypes of collective subconsciousness such as Jung developed as a theory. The concept of projections is equally dubious today. As applied to God it conflates history at a massive scale positing a common cause for events and ideas that are mostly lost from history. One tribe may have had a different reason for beginning an idea than another. In the case of Abraham, that wasn't a collective experience. It was an individual, personal encounter. David Rosenberg wrote a biography for Abraham that is a very interesting read.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/502016.Abraham
The Tower was one of Jung’s archetypes as well as a novel by Stephen King. People today ought to be able to sort out their ideas about reality and know what they think about particular aspects of it. There is a tendency toward postulating a common explanation without much basis for a panoply of events that are selected and lumped together. Conscious ideas about reality differ from those of the subconscious and tend to arise from experience and education. There is a field of study called the history of ideas. Generally they require pretty good support for the origin of ideas in order not to be myths themselves.
Consider the Japanese Shinto religion for example. Where did the idea of Tori-spirit gates arise? I don’t know. Here is a good mythical account though that differs from some sort of common human projection…
A warlord made an heroic last stand in the gate of a wooden fortress on fire. His clan saw his dedication to defeating the overwhelming power of the enemy, yet at last, overcome by wounds he fell to his knees and was then beheaded. His forces were being driven back at the sight of their fallen leader. Just then a great eagle descended from the sky amidst the battle landing atop the gate and the warriors of the fallen hero knew the spirit of the warlord had returned. They rallied and drove back the enemy to the sea. Thereafter the spirit gate was recognized as a place where the spirits of the dead returned to help those still living in the world.
Pagan religion may have each had a different origin. In some cases kings simply declared themselves to be a god. Jews, Christians and Muslims share a common origin of their faith through Abraham and successors that wasn’t a projection of consciousness comparable to the origin of polytheists and numerous other belief systems. It is easy to construct a generality as an explanation for the unknown, yet unscientific.
For a while at least people will be able to discern the differences between A.I. readers of internet advertisements and stories with those of humans. Human tend to make some speech errors that differ from those of A.I. A.I. may pronounce ‘minerals’ ‘minurals’ as in manure for example, while a human if intentionally mispronouncing a a word would tend use a popular demotic political or innuendo spin replacement.
Lost to history are human pronunciations of ‘program’, ‘progrum’. It would be laughable if an A.I. said progrum.
With the rise of robots sales replacement workers in corporate jobs will accelerate. One can imagine Amazon using lots of robots to replace humans. I once looked for labor work in Phoenix years ago and would stand in a long line at labor ready hoping to get hired to no avail. Same story in Albuquerque.
The only jobs illegal aliens didn’t take were regular corporate jobs where illegals can’t be hired because the penalties would be too great for regular corporations to take the risk. All of the ad hoc jobs for working at Democrat owned homes were filled by illegal aliens. Robots will make it even more difficult to find work. No point in riding a bike to Apache Junction at 3 in the morning to find work with labor ready because there isn't any. Well, I did get four hours work at a Home Depot in Phoenix putting up shelves.
So Americans may tend to learn A.I. accented speech since that is what they are increasingly listening too. There are numerous A.I. text reader services available at the Google Play Store and elsewhere that do a very credible job of reading text. Business making advertisements use it a lot since it’s far cheaper than human actor-readers.
I like those Facebook stories with a photo perhaps generated by AI of a brown bear supplicant to a human for help removing a bear trap from a paw, or to follow it into the woods to rescue a cub from a well. One need write a decent story and A.I. will read the engaging story of human compassionate binding with a troubled wild animal that often becomes a friend for life and returns to visit annually. Many of them use the same A.I. reader. I had thought about having A.I. generate a photo of a troubled bear that had grown pig’s wings because of an evil scientist’s experiment cooking pharmaceuticals in a dark forest on innocent animal vectors that escaped to plea with the first human they found who happened to have parachuted in a halo jump to make it to a polling place, yet the project didn’t work out. I was limited to about 3 minutes reading with the free version of the A.I. reader. The flying bear epic never got off the ground.
I probably should wait until A.I. makes a lot of non-standard regional accents available, or talks in Tlingit language, before I try to make any fiction video short stories.
Algorithms occur in an incomplete paradigm where a sum or answer is wanted. Much of the Universe may be in a Algorithms are structures; structures used to process information or data points presented within someone’s lexicon universe. Like D9 caterpillars AI can push a lot of stuff. Is the Universe made of algorithms? No.
Algorithms exists in the universe though, in some way.
I like the new structure associahedrons used for calculating particle interaction. Quantum entanglement that occurs possibly even at billions of light years distance isn’t likely to perform algorithms, unless a designer made it so, instead there should a direct relationship. rather than a calculating continuum although change seems perpetual from a human perspective.
There are responsive structures in the Universe at some scale greater than the four dimensions of space-time. I don’t believe that is machine learning or deep learning or neural network algorithmic structures.
https://youtu.be/UhG56kltfP4?feature=shared
You have written well in support of violence to resist oppression. You would like Christians to join with the violence in order to overthrow the corrupt. Morality you say is not what’s practical, it is what is right. On that point I would point out that for me, morality is what people actually do rather than an a priori code of conduct, unless it is true divine command.
Original sin is the human condition. There will never be a perfect and just government on Earth until the second coming of Christ. Christian conduct and ethics are for Christians. If everyone acted with true Christian ethics worldly governance would be better. Christ led by example; followers are to conduct themselves as best as they can in his way.
Human conflicts and human nature supply wrong answers and paradigms to solve political problems quite often. One who has witnessed the bungling of the post Cold War peace by the west leading to the Ukraine conflict and the million casualties roughly, or the first Syrian Civil War during the Obama era causing hundred of thousands of casualties and numerous other events of equally avoidable stature should realize that there is no point for Christians to chase after military powers or engage in civil wars as if they would bring about a just society of permanent duration.
Christians are supposed to keep their focus on the eternal time paradigm with God instead of the temporal where as Shakespeare wrote “It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” God has a plan for ideal human conduct for the kingdom of God. Mankind has very different ends than being in accord with God. Worldly codes of conduct are different than eternal codes. It is like comparing apples and shoes.
Christians can simply lead by example. They need to be the good news of Jesus Christ to those lost to wickedness, violence, corruption, exploitation, greed, envy and usual Machiavellian means of human conduct. That probably can't be accomplished by leading the charge in kamikaze attacks on the enemy. As a jihadist.
I believe your historical analysis is simplistic. Hitler was put into power by the high command of the Wehrmacht. He was sent to take over leadership of the Socialist Democratic Workers party with his recognizable charisma. Hitler had the inside track and easily became the leader. He was supported by the S.A. that was largely comprised of former socialists. They used violence and took down opposition leadership. After the German civil war deposed the aristocrats they needed to find a new avenue back into power and that was through Adolph Hitler and the NAZI party. Mussolini’s philosophy of corporatism developed by the Nazis brought the rich aristocrats into a new relation with the state uniting corporate leadership under the Fuhrer. That was an irresistible force for the Nazis. Germans did not know before the fact what extremes the Nazis would enact. Maybe they seemed morally correct to many before the war. Even in the United States eugenics were popular with some doctors. A few Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer did resit Hitler at the cost of their life.
Stalin was a ruthless dictator using state means to repress the public. With such power organized resistance domestically was nearly futile. Revolt needed simply to evolve within leadership ranks of the communist party such that the system could itself defect to non-being. If you were to read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago volumes 1-3 and a dozen other books on Russian history (I did) you might have a better idea about the nature of the regime and it’s means of control.
Christians are not submitting to unjust systems; for that matter all worldly systems have an element of injustice in them I would think, they are submitting to God’s will for humanity. The worldly system is that of outsiders to the theonomy that do the crazy things they do making life hell for people that Christians are not going to be part of.
There would be limits for Christians immersed in a corrupt system. Not so many Christians have the courage of Peter or Paul to be faithful unto death. Some do, some don’t. What Christians couldn’t do would be to perpetrate unjust acts themselves at the order of the state I would think, yet those are hypotheticals.
Slavery hasn’t actually ended everywhere, yet in the 19th century when it was ending it was largely conferred from above upon the enslaved. Britain’s motivated by Magna Carta ended slavery in their possessions. In the United States the government ended slavery in passing in order to keep the nation undivided. Southern slave state wanted to be free to violate state’s rights and assert their right to go into other states to capture and return escaped slaves. The U.S. Government couldn’t tolerate that and the slave states rebelled against the government. One might seem an element of divine providence in the end of slavery in the U.S.A.
I think the South Africans could have kept apartheid going for quite some time if the institution hadn’t become obsolete. The west no longer supported that policy. Without sanctions and disapprobation of the west it might have continued although it might have perished from internal rot. Negotiations to end apartheid started in May 19900. That was a hopeful time when the Soviet Union was crumbling. Russians had withdrawn a quarter million soldiers from East Germany in December 1989. One might see a divine hand in the events. Ronald Reagan was a man of faith.
-another reply
This is rather tedious yet I will need to itemize your points and reply. I have other things to do with my time.
1) I deny that my points are full of logical fallacies.
2) If you were advocating non-violent resistance to slavery and political oppression by Hitler and Stalin, that wasn’t the language you used. In democracy at least Christians are free to resist corruption through lawful means. I am glad that you do not advocate violence- it seemed that way.
3) I will quote the third point you made; “You also assert that morality is what people “actually do” unless it’s “true divine command,” but that’s an unproven premise. Your argument assumes divine command exists and that it’s the ultimate authority without providing any evidence for this claim.”
My viewpoint on morality is a philosophical one. Since there are so many varieties of moral packages in existence it is what the most realistic observation is so far as my opinion goes
Christian ethics are meaningful because of divine instruction. Christians believe that. The belief is not reliant on agnostic or atheist confirmation about being sourced from God.
4) It is not a false dichotomy to assert that divine commands are not secular. Christians can follow divine commands while the lost are free to follow secular moral systems that are incomplete and disregard divine commands. As I said there are a variety of moral systems and structures in existence. Many of those are incomplete and illogical.
5) Saying that there won’t be a perfect government until the second coming is not futility. I have worked to improve secular government for perhaps 40 years and that was futility. Humans repeat te same errors and inherit ignorance from generation to generations. “We learn from history that we do not learn from history”.
6) You wrote; “Hitler didn’t rise to power solely through the Wehrmacht or aristocrats; his rise was enabled by economic despair, anti-Semitism, and widespread support for his ideology, which he openly laid out in Mein Kampf.”
Hitler was ordered by the high command to infiltrate leadership of the German National Socialiist Workers Party. Obviously the economy and political structure was unstable and royalty had been overthrown. Hitler’s rise was engineered and then followed the build up phenomena such as being imprisoned for the Munich puscht where Rudolph Hess wrote Mein Kampf as Hitler dictated. AI;”he Sturmabteilung (SA), also known as the "brownshirts", supported Adolf Hitler in the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, also known as the Munich Putsch”. Hitler’s movement had power behind it from the start.
The SS and Gestapo also supported Hitler when he purged the leadership of the very dangerous S.A. in 1934 killing about 150 members include Ernst Roem.
7) You wrote “Similarly, while Stalin was a ruthless dictator his regime relied not just on top-down repression but on complicity from countless collaborators.”
Stalin was a ruthless dictator who continuously consolidated power in the communist party that was itself a minority movement. Just the dekulakization program to eliminate working class property killed 400,000. Twenty million people were liquidated by Stalin’s communist subordinates. Maybe you aren’t aware of what secret police forces did in the Soviet Union, or Iraq, Syria and Iran. The K.G.B. leader Beria had a room in a basement where he would take people to shoot them in the head himself. The Soviet experiement was a radical, aggressive program to weed out ‘anti-soviet activity’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin
8) To portray Hitler or Stalin as religious leaders is laughable.
9) You wrote “Your take on apartheid and slavery is downright dismissive. Saying apartheid could have lasted longer if it hadn’t become “obsolete” trivializes the suffering of millions who endured institutionalized racism. It wasn’t “obsolete”—it was unsustainable because of internal resistance and external pressure.”
Internal and external pressure to change is why apartheid was obsolete. I don’t have time or inclination to write a book on that topic. The slave revolt of Haiti was one of the few that was successful. The mistake they made was in inviting the former slavers to return to Haiti to make the plantations work and create jobs. Many of the former slavers did return to be executed. That created part of the problem for Haiti that lasted to the present.
10) You wrote “ By crediting divine intervention, you conveniently absolve human systems of their responsibility for perpetuating these atrocities.’
That isn’t even nominally logical. Compare “by crediting the F.B.I. for stopping drug trafficking, you conveniently absolve drug traffickers for perpetuating drug trafficking."
11) Christians don’t need to “claim the high moral ground”. You misunderstand Christian ethics and assume they are in competition with secular moral systems. Christians may act to put positive spin on political phenomenalities when it might do some good. Others might not want Christians to do that even in democracy perhaps.
I tend to think of fate as joss. That is whatever occurs happens. My regard is to consider it a post hoc description of what happened.
The Chinese derived joss from a Portuguese term for God. In the Chinese culture it can mean fate or luck.
So I regard fate as a kind of gestalt or complete complex of compresence. A scene such as that in 1812 where Napoleon views a corpse resplendent in an officers uniform on a battlefield and declares “voila, a splendid death!”. That is joss or fate.
Yet as a Christian I believe God has an intention for the world. Details are beyond my pay grade.
The Berlin Wall was part of history very well documented. I rode a train through East Germany to visit West Berlin in 1987 when it was still divided.
In 1974 West Germany began to seek new normal relations with East Germany with Ostpolitik. It began to work. West Berlin was like an island of freedom in East Germany.
Earlier the Soviets had blockaded the west from reaching it by rail and road. The Berlin airlift kept supplies reaching Western sectors of the city. Then the wall was built in the city to prevent Germans from escaping. It required the Nixon administration and Henry Kissinger working with
Willie Brandt and Helmut Schmidt to get the trash flowing freely to communist dumps in a sign of trust and progress.
A Pragmatist Truth paradigm seems to be somewhat of a verficationist paradigm. Socrates said that true belief and knowledge are equivalent. Truth values are found with verification and usefulness of something asserted as fact. That is not the same as saying that such a thing as truth-in-itself exists as a realist entity. Instead it is a neo-realist description.
If one says that AX is Z, and then tests the proposition finding that AX necessitates Z commutatively, and Z works in algorithms just like AX then it is true to say that AX and Z are equivalent.
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Established economies are difficult to change to something better. Too much is invested in the present system. Change evolves at best with directed evolution instead of revolution. Putting fire breaks and fire proof housing in established communities would be nearly impossible.
What might work is using new technologies for improved fire spotting and suppression. Fire resistant Tesla style solar roof panels to create energy self-sufficiency to reduce fire ignition sources in power transmission lines suc as the Paradise fire ought to be mandatory.
I wrote years ago about establishing a million goat army to eat brush and forest floor dead leaf layers as a practical way to reduce fire combustibles. Before humans lived in North America lightning was the only source of ignition. Today there are literally billions with drunks tossing cigarette butts out the window along with a cloud of additional sources. Maybe some d signer bug will eat Los Angeles foliage occasionally in the future.
Drones could be used for fire spotting and faster suppression response time. Desalinating sea water on a large scale could fill covered fire control water reserves. I would suggest building canals along the Mexican border to fill with seawater pumped uphill to the Continental divide with solar power. Let the water and be collected when it comes on sloped clear roofs from the locks numbering in the thousands. Freshwater would flow in pipelines east and west to bring water to deserts.
Getting fire breaks built across the west will be nearly impossible with established vested interests resisting. As global warming increases national desertification people will want more water and find less unless the make it themselves. Making home power production increase is part of the equation for satisfactory fire suppression.
A nation cannot afford to pay for reconstruction of costly homes for the prosperous lost because the rich sometimes are airheads on public safety concerns a priori.
