Greenpeace entregó a la Justicia y al Gobierno del Chaco imágenes de desmontes en El Impenetrable

cyberalpha · 2012-05-25T20:41:13.899602+00:00

No entiendo cuál es la alternativa. ¿Que las comunidades mueran de hambre?

Cuando la ideología está expresada en términos dicotómicos, lo más probable es que sea falsa. Después de todo, ¿cuál es el objetivo estratégico (a largo plazo, final de juego) de Greenpeace?

jprichardson · 2012-05-25T20:28:57.319996+00:00

it just doesn’t really make much sense to call it “idleness”, since it was one of the most productive times of my life.

Right. I just don't think that the members of an essentially Calvinist culture (Germanic Europe, in the broadest of terms) are capable of understanding, much less experiencing the Latin concept of idlennes, the otium.

Also, not programming.

Samamaniac · 2012-05-25T20:03:29.389203+00:00

Gratias tibi ago, amice! Non normaliter Latinem utor quia, item, litterae Latinae non satis bonae mihi doctae fuerunt (ita, nunquam Latine in schola conversare agimus), item, Graecas multum magis fruo ;-) Ego non pius nec religiosus, sed tantum numerum operarum antiquorum melior capere amoenus mihi est.

tharosbr0 · 1 day

Churros en el Manolo de Rivadavia, en MDQ. Life is good…

Momentumjam · 2 days

Are you Xander Zygmunt and his brother Xavier? Your parents are devious.

nnnslogan · 2 days

We'll grab Nefandi and I'll come too!

You're all welcome!

nnnslogan · 3 days

I'd really like to talk about your mistrust of science here, if you're willing.

You sound juuuust a bit like a JW trying to push a Watchtower on me :-p Are you going to sell me a subscription to Skeptical Enquirer? ;-)

nnnslogan · 3 days

Exactly!

nnnslogan · 3 days

Luke 8:43-48, my favorite Jesus trick.

nnnslogan · 3 days

Several. If you ever come to Buenos Aires, PM me. we'll go out for a coffee and I'll tell you about them.

nnnslogan · 3 days

I respect science, as science does not demand that I put myself in a position of believing something without any evidence, and I appreciate that very much.

I mistrust science, as science does demand that I put myself in a position of believing something without any evidence, and I resent that very much.

I'm seeking the truths that are true regardless of whether or not I believe them

You're no true Skeptic, then, much as you would like to call yourself one. You're a Platonist, wether you like the label or not.

If I failed at this, I apologize. I assure you that it wasn't my intent!

You hadn't, so there is no need to.

nnnslogan · 3 days

There are fundamental truths in our material universe

How do you know? How do you know they're truths? How do you know they're fundamental?

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed

How do you know?

186,282 miles per second is the universal speed limit

How do you know it's universal?

These … would be true even if there were no humans to observe them.

How do you know? How do you define "truth" independently of observers?

The material universe is testable, repeatable, can be used to make accurate predictions, and so on and so forth.

How do you know?

Everything we think about when we hear the term "empirical data" applies to the material universe.

How do you know?

This for a single paragraph.

The goalposts become more and more distant, and our general knowledge of how the universe works stays just the same.

Fair enough, but this is the rub: the goalposts are being moved by both parties! It's not that "the medium should submit willingly to empirical validation or shut up", since whenever a medium submits it's either a fake, a bunk, a charlatan or a statistical error (cf the treatment of Dean Radin, P.E.A.R. and so forth). I'm not saying that you should "drink the occultist's kool-aid" and "free your mind"; what I'm saying is that you should apply the principle of charity and stop and consider that the misunderstanding might be due to a "language" (more like a mode of thought, actually) barrier that both parties should be willing to bridge.

If this is where our beliefs in an immaterial universe come from, then I do believe I have good reason to be suspect

There isn't just one valid mode of knowledge (at least nothing says there ought to be). If you insist there is then it's no wonder you're frustrated, and there will be no end to your frustration. In other words, the same source of biases is the source of rationality (and as I've said to you before, empiricism is predicated on a huge bias, namely, that the more things seem the same the more they resemble their essence); there's nothing to say that one is to be done away with and the other to be upheld as the ultimate yardstick.

The scientific approach is very capable of establishing truths about the world without human perception soiling it all up

(my emphasis) Who do you say does science, and with what faculty?

I just want to make sure everyone is clear on where I'm coming from. The reason? I'd like someone to get through to me!

That would need to be you yourself, I think. The question is, are you prepared for someone to get through you, or are you too comfortable in your certainties? Good luck!

nnnslogan · 3 days

Another approach is to embrace contradiction and nonsense as first-class citizens of reality.

Lewis Carroll's school of theurgy. I'm so down with it.

nnnslogan · 3 days

Ortega y Gasset proposes that philosophy must overcome the limitations of both idealism (in which reality is centered around the ego) and ancient-medieval realism (in which reality is located outside the subject) in order to focus on the only truthful reality (i.e., "my life" — the life of each individual). He suggests that there is no me without things and things are nothing without me: "I" (human being) can not be detached from "my circumstance" (world). This led Ortega y Gasset to pronounce his famous maxim "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" ("I am I and my circumstance")

Ortega y Gasset is one of the unjustly neglected philosophers, and I find his position both simple, coherent and useful, even though I'm not a fan of dialectical materialism as a solution to dilemmas like idealism/realism.

matute4 · 3 days

Retiro la apuesta: "soy feliz desde que era chiquito", "mi casa es un quilombo desde que vivía con mi novia", etc.

El tema es: ¿si tengo 40 años, tengo también 10 años, o ya no más? Creo que se puede discutir en un sentido o el otro para salvar "hago X desde que tengo Y años"; en todo caso es "tomo mate (porque lo tomaba y lo sigo tomando) desde que tenía 10 años", o "tomé mate (porque ya no lo tomo más) desde que tenía 10 años hasta que tuve 30, porque me dio úlcera."

matute4 · 3 days

Te vamo' a caer con el INADI, te vamo'…

matute4 · 3 days

Nope, cometiste el mismo error que acá: prótasis en subjuntivo, apódosis en condicional para los períodos hipotéticos irreales (la gramática griega es maravillosa). En castellano: cuando el condicional expresa una acción irreal, la cláusula subordinada va en subjuntivo y la cláusula subordinante en condicional: "si yo no supiera castellano hablaría en otro idioma", o "si yo no hubiera nacido en Argentina, habría nacido en otro país", o…

matute4 · 3 days

PUTO, MORITE

Homophobia, in my reddit? Never!

Edit: ¿se imaginan el día que SRS entienda algo que no sea inglés? Shudder.

matute4 · 3 days

*"Leía boludeces en reddit desde que era miembro"
"Tengo marcas en la piel desde que tuve varicela"

"Desde que" tiene sentido con el indefinido (si la acción terminó) o con el presente (si la acción continúa), porque siempre tiene valor puntual. El imperfecto tiene valor durativo, por lo que jamás puede usarse con "desde que".

/grammar nazi hat off

Edit: confusión de indefinido por imperfecto :-p Y retiro la apuesta: "soy feliz desde que era chiquito", "odio el pescado desde que mi abuela me lo preparaba todos los días para el almuerzo", etc.

nnnslogan · 3 days

I fully agree, I merely re-couched the terms of your challenge because for me, the next interesting question after: "who thinks your thoughts" or "for whom do you think your thoughts" is "what makes you so afraid to think new thoughts".

to truly own your own mind is to be crazy. To be sane is to be a slave.

Have you read Celia Green? On human evasion is short and demolishing.

The occult is voluntary and disciplined insanity

Yay for that. I'm finding hang-ups and barnacles that I never thought I had.

nnnslogan · 3 days

If you can't think arbitrarily, is your mind still yours?

If you're given an iPad for Christmas but you despise being called an Apple fanboy and you keep it unopened and unused, is the iPad still yours? I would ask you, what is it that makes you so Applephobic?

Cue psychological theories, pop or otherwise, about internalized phobias ;-)

nnnslogan · 3 days

But it's irrational to assume others would hold that view to an extent where they believe it as general assumption.

A thousand times so! I'm only saying, it cuts both ways: science is remarkably effective, but so is occultism for their practitioners, and neither has any reason to really be so.

If you think about it, both science and hermetics claim exactly the same thing: the Universe, visible and invisible, conforms exactly to the structure of our minds. Science says that our minds are little, vanishing, inexistent; while hermetics says our minds are enormous, commensurate with the Universe, even. I know which view conforts me most.

nnnslogan · 3 days

I wonder -- do the esoteric/gnostic texts (or any other reference materials) specify whether the magic you reference happens outside of the practitioner's perception?

I'm not a theorist, but I'll take a stab at answering you. First and foremost, the magical metaphysics is based on a system of correspondences, not one of causal links. In effect it is purely metaphorical: "this corresponds to this, so by this 'symbolic' act I expect to see a corresponding manifestation in this or that plane". Here you might have your answer to a first approximation: magic is purely psychological.

Except that that is the view "from the outside", with the causal-link-discerning goggles of rationality. From the inside, with the non-dual-symbolic-correspondences goggles of magical thinking, the mind of the practitioner is in perfect correspondence with the Universe (as below so above), and in fact it is the Universe (for sufficiently advanced, self-realized practitioners at least). So the "true adept" cannot help but to change the world as she changes herself, and vice-versa.

nnnslogan · 3 days

we no longer have a finite system built on logic. Which we need as ground work.

I don't see why it should, and in any case I don't see why we need it, except for some narrowly defined occasions in which it is "proven" to be useful. There's nothing in the Universe that it says it itself must be logical, nor that it actually is. There's nothing even that says that logic is universally applicable to everything that we humans perceive and experience. Indeed, the fact that it's not very difficult to apply logic to defeat logic arguments themselves makes me question the value of logic outside very narrowly defined scopes.

What you two discuss isn't what should be accepted into reality. But what should be accepted in general assumptions

Exactly. My beef is not even methodological, it's purely metaphysic. In few words: I don't think that rationalism is the best outlook for everyday life for us humans: it breaks down rather easily when confronted with the subjective experience and it tends to be dogmatic about the structure, composition and nature of the experiential world, in a way that it doesn't really support with rational arguments.

nnnslogan · 4 days

You say "there could be psychics, but no one has ever observed one. This can mean (a) there are psychics but they hide very well, or (b) there are no psychics." you apply Occam and choose, a priori, (b).

So far, so good, except that in my mind this is no true skepticism; just inductive bias. First, you fall prey to the Black Swan Fallacy: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, unless you subscribe to Bayesianism and you can justify your prior. Regarding that, I am of the opinion that, in a world of possibilities the probability of an impossibility is the one that is negligible; in effect, I don't think that Occam is a sound reasoning principle to argue for non-existence.

Second, couched in purely possible-necessary (that is, modal) logical terms, you cannot admit possibility of some P existing but then claim that, in fact, necessarily P does not exist. I'm not saying that you actually did, but in the limit of "its probability being so drastically against its favor", in the region where epistemic agnosticism meets certitude, the argument turns into that invalid inference. For me, that speaks against Bayesian reasoning from very small priors.

Third, you might want to counter with Russell's Teapot to place the burden of proof on me. Again, all very well, except (1) I'm not making a positive claim of existence; I'm making a negative claim of negative claim of existence; the burden of proof is on you to prove that your argument is valid, and (2) Russell's Teapot is predicated on a howler of a category error, so at best it begs the question and at worst it is rubbish.

All in all, I think that your zeal is admirable but ultimately misplaced: true skepticism should reject all certainties, not just those that are uncomfortable. I hope that was a bit clearer than what I wrote before.

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