Posts by crimsonjackal8

For me, Wake of Medusa is easily the best one out there 🙏 🙂

kunigunda said:[Am]Hey, the morning dawned [Dm]and the dream has faded
[E]Maybe Denis will show up, maybe [Am]it'll be a colorful day

Man, someone’s really feeling nostalgic for October 😲 🙏

And of course I stumble right onto this after spending my entire weekend buried in the Encyclopedia of Mythology 😢 Dammit, nostalgia is a killer...

They’re decent enough, I guess, but honestly? A bit predictable—which makes them a little dull at times.

Still, Circo Iberico 🙂 🙂 (they actually remind me of those chaotic Mardi Gras celebrations 🙄 )

BTW, what's your take on Fermina Muguroz? She is absolutely killer 👍

Cro-Fag said:Yeah, I remember seeing an article back in Life magazine—a few years ago, before they stopped printing—about genetics and how much it shapes who we are..

hmm
🤔but then you look at biology and all this research, and it starts to feel like free will is mostly an illusion (not unlike how the Bible describes things).. it suggests everything is basically predetermined.. that we don't actually have that much control over our lives, just stuck living out whatever our DNA dictates instead of making our own choices.

Look, there’s a massive difference between saying genes influence a physical trait and claiming that trait is entirely hardwired. It's pretty obvious that environment and upbringing play a huge role in shaping a person.

That said, I don't think the whole free will debate really hinges on that. It feels like we're mixing up different levels of analysis here. For instance, personally, I don't believe humans truly possess free will—but at the same time, I think the assumption of it is absolutely necessary for society to function. It’s hard for me to imagine coming home wasted and my wife just shrugging it off because "some deterministic neurological processes were running through my brain."

bluewolf4 said:Hmmmm....
Regarding the tracklist—none of these lists show even a hint of actual DJ skills...
I don't see how anyone is supposed to keep the energy up at a party with tracks that don't match beats at all, not to mention the constant, jarring shifts in pitch.....

Seriously! Whenever I hear that the beats and pitch aren't lining up, I immediately head to a different bar... one where they don't even know what beats or pitch are. 🙂

To hell with the pitch. 🙄 🙂

This is a fascinating topic, though I honestly feel it belongs more in the realm of the natural or social sciences 👍

To put it simply, you’re asking whether our viewpoints are shaped by genetics. Current research suggests they absolutely are. Ovo is actually a classic study—based on twin research—that demonstrates how much of our outlook is influenced by hereditary factors.

The real question, though, is the mechanism—how exactly can genes influence an attitude? It’s obvious that a specific opinion (say, being pro-choice or thinking chess is a blast) isn't hardcoded directly into our DNA. There are some pretty compelling hypotheses regarding how that works, which are touched upon in the text provided.

hollowseal33 said:The issue isn't actually the people—it's that the music itself is so shallow and mind-numbing that it only really works when you're pairing it with cheap bourbon and greasy burgers, like some sort of ritualistic attempt to reconnect with your most primal, unrefined roots.

For the millionth time, the real problem is that for some people, music actually represents something more than just background noise for a dance floor. And frankly, that kind of pop-country trash has no place there. In fact, it’s almost insulting to anyone with actual taste because of how mindless it is.

Since when did bourbon and burgers become "mind-numbing"?😕

Humans have been drumming and rhyming since we crawled out of caves. Why on earth should we limit ourselves to modern productions coming out of English-speaking countries? You've got folk groups, Mexico, Spaniards, Southern Italy, Ohio, Jamaica, India, cowboys, Canada, Mexico, Albania...🙂

I don't know, maybe the problem is just that I'm starting to get annoyed by things everyone else thinks are cool. And "reconnecting with your roots" doesn't have to mean regressing into stupidity or bitterness. For me, Louis Armstrong hits right in the soul—and damn it, if you don't like it, that's your business.🙂

Kevin Chavez3 said:Honestly, placidotter15 makes a solid point. Personally, listening to mainstream country music makes me want to lose my lunch—but I can’t really argue against the technicality of it when you realize some of my favorite bands pull from those same roots. And once I met a few folks who jump between punk, jazz, all sorts of avant-garde stuff and standard country, and happen to be incredibly sharp, well-educated people... it pretty much killed my last argument against the genre. Whatever. As long as I don't have to listen to it myself, they can enjoy it.

Glad we're on the same page—I'm the second one here, crimsonjackal8 😎

(Aside from all that avant-garde stuff 🙄 )

Take Tom Jones, for example—"What You Gotta Do When Love Requires a Goodbye" 🙂

Bill Gates said:I actually made that happen yesterday at a Taco Bell during a Bon Jovi concert 🤣

Coney Island hot dogs, plum brandy, and Bon Jovi 😲 😲

Led Zeppelin said:Why would I listen to rock or metal? You can't even put Country Music in the same conversation as rock.

You clearly haven't a clue. For me, Fire Kiss and Postman Law and Only are absolute classics 🙏 Not to mention the legends at Gal Halid Hall 🙏

To all you people hating on Country Music—my advice? Go grab a plate of decent BBQ, crack open a bottle of bourbon, and blast some Elvis Presley. 🙂 Then you'll see what a real party looks like. 😁

Not bad at all for the black block 😁

Personally, I’ll stick to one hit after another—if anyone has a problem with that, they can head over to some trendy hipster lounge in downtown Chicago to listen to repetitive dance beats 🙄 or maybe find an old-school classic rock station for a healthy dose of good old hard rock 🙄

1. Ramones - What do I get
2. Clash - Janie Jones
3. Ramones - Sheena is a punk rocker
4. New York Dolls - Looking for a Kiss
5. Stiff Little Fingers - Alternative Ulster
6. Jon Spencer be - Dynamite lover
7. Mudhoney - touch me I'm sick
8. Rolling Stones Discography
9. David Bowie - Heroes
10. Ramones - Punk Rock Anthem
11. Joy Division
12. Sex Pistols
13. Dictators - California Sun
14. Rancid
15. Screaching Weasel
16. Lagwagon
17. The Cramps
18. The Donnas - that one thing, I don't know what it's called🙄
19. Sonic Youth - Goo
20. Lou Reed - Vicious
21. The Fall😁
22. Stooges - I wanna be your dog
23. Pixies - Debaser
24. The Vaselines - Happy place
25. T-Rex - 20th century boy
26. Misfits

👋 🙂 🙂 🙂

And no, I wasn't born to be a DJ 🙂

Kosmarac said:Fine, go ahead and churn out your own little postmodernist manifestos then.

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

That was actually the very first link I even posted 🙂

Come on, Košmarč, stay with me here.🙄

adriatic said:Fine, let me play the role of the "anarcho-leftist dreamer" here! 😁

Do you honestly believe that Brazilians (the vast majority of them) actually gain anything from destroying the Amazon? 😕
Or that their lives would somehow get worse if they just stopped tearing it apart? 😕

How can anyone even try to "speak for Brazil"? It’s not some singular, sentient entity. 😕

We could try pretending to be the common people (the Brazilian masses) who have zero say in the matter, or we could pretend to be the ruling elite who—for their own short-term gain at the expense of everyone else—is gutting the Amazon.

But I don't see any overlap between those two groups, so trying to occupy both positions—the exploited and the exploiter—at once is just impossible.

My take? It’s in the best interest of Brazilians to preserve the Amazon for their own sake, not out of some vague, abstract sense of "altruism."

Well, theoretically speaking, I’m with you. (And for the record, even though I know it’s mostly wishful thinking, I’ve always had a soft spot for anarchism and leftist ideals 😁 )

The reality is that the Brazilian government relies on logging to pad its thin budget—though, absurdly enough, the real winners are the Brazilian billionaires and the global corporate giants. And likely, plenty of impoverished Brazilians get a tiny slice of the pie too—if the budget shrinks further, it’s the poorest who will feel the hit first.

The point is, if there's nothing standing in their way, people will very often default to selfishness and chase quick, short-term wins.

And I actually agree with your final point. Like some Buddhist once said—altruism is really just the only form of true egoism left. Especially when you look at things through a long-term, global lens.

Look, this whole cars&girls thing is a joke—you really have to read those lyrics with a healthy dose of irony 😁

I think the real issue stems from expecting people to act out of pure, unadulterated altruism. In any group of true altruists, it only takes one selfish jerk to wreck the whole thing—which is exactly why pure altruism never actually evolved. What *did* evolve, though, was reciprocal altruism—basically the "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" approach. We need to stop nursing the illusion that we can just wake everyone up and turn them into saints; instead, we should figure out how to manage things through a system of restrictions, sanctions, incentives, and persuasion.

Take a country like Brazil, for example. It’s a developing nation with precious natural resources, specifically its massive forests. Why would they bother saving the planet by preserving their timber when wealthier nations are constantly stepping on them? The answer isn't trying to force Brazil to become some purely selfless state—which, let's be honest, would just make them a laughingstock—but rather figuring out what actual BENEFITS they get for slowing down deforestation. You have to find a way to implement those measures without putting them in the red.

I know that sounds cold, but that's just human nature. Unfortunately. That’s why I think all those anarchist, far-left fantasies are doomed to fail, no matter how tempting they might sound.

Amanda Fowler2 said:Heidegger’s prophetic view of technology feels more like a reaction to disappointment—kind of like how Nietzsche critiqued Christianity. It’s this ambivalent relationship with whatever happens to be dominant at the time. If you want to find the real culprits, though, you have to look toward Descartes and Leibniz. I mean, look at those philosophers who were also mathematicians; they were truly epochal. Their whole thing was this idolatry of the number—specifically, differential calculus. They basically birthed the shift from pure philosophy into mathematics. They were the modern Pythagoreans. Sure, you can subject Pythagoras's lyre music to calculation—you can numerically rank the strings that produce specific tones—but does that mean we should declare music to be nothing more than a measurement?😕

Heidegger adds another layer to this: "What remains is created by poets."🙂

But honestly, what choice do we have? Sound waves are physical phenomena, so describing them mathematically is just part of the territory. 😉 On top of that, there are plenty of other scientific ways to approach music—take, for instance, the theories on musical grammar proposed by Lerdahl and Jackendoff (one presentation, a brief overview).

That said, why should a scientific description or an explanation of certain musical elements dictate how we actually choose to listen? 😕

And why blame Descartes and Leibniz for all this? Is it because of the massive leaps in mathematics or their immense contributions to philosophy? Why assume science and art are inherently at odds? And really, besides the ultra-wealthy, who else is actually prone to this "idolatry of the number"?

Bradley Fisher20 said:How can you be so sure?

There are several layers to this. I’m not necessarily saying future machines won't get it, but the ones we have today? They just don't.

The first reason is unprovable, really—it's more of an intuitive hunch—but it feels right. It’s hard to wrap my head around the idea that today's hardware is actually conscious of anything at all.

Then there’s the philosophical side of things. To put it bluntly, current machines fall straight into the trap of the Searlean Chinese room argument, or if you prefer the Harnadian take, the symbol grounding problem. Basically, you can't build true semantics within purely formal systems that lack any connection to perception or physical movement. It's a similar line of reasoning used by Dreyfus—that well-known Heideggerian 🙂 in his famous book, "What computers can't do?".

Finally, there's a third reason—which ties back to the others, and maybe even the first one—that true "understanders" have the ability to step outside a fixed set of rules (like the rules for playing chess, for instance) and actually reflect on those rules, and then reflect on that reflection, and so on. Why that works that way is a tough nut to crack...

Anyway, let's try to stick to the topic here 😉

crimsonjackal8 said:I’m not sure how much noise this made, but it feels to me like scientific positivism just took a massive hit. A recent paper was published in a major scientific journal that was essentially the work of a computer. We're talking about a machine posing the question and carrying out the entire "investigation" from start to finish.
So, where does that leave us? If I bring up Heidegger—who famously argued that "science does not think, science calculates"—you’ll probably just roll your eyes at me. But if a computer is doing the thinking, what's the move then? Is it actually philosophizing?

Don't panic, though. This isn't nearly as dramatic as it sounds. It wasn't a robot that actually wrote the paper; rather, scientists published research detailing how a robot can be utilized as a tool for investigation.
That robot is still a human creation. It's almost certainly packed with a massive knowledge base—think of it as a sophisticated expert system combined with flexible reasoning capabilities (the kind of stuff being heavily researched right now). In a specific micro-domain, a machine like that works beautifully. However, there remains an unbridgeable gap between the machine and the scientist—much like the gap between Deep Blue and a mediocre chess player like myself. Computers simply don't understand the implications of what they are doing.

Some food for thought... Why shouldn't automation contribute to science? In certain fields—like chess today, or perhaps experimental genetics tomorrow, as mentioned in the article—couldn't machines actually draw better conclusions than humans? And why would this even be a blow to positivist philosophy? Wouldn't it actually support it?

Alright, let me give this a shot. I’ll try to summarize your initial post—at least how I interpreted your core argument—and then respond point by point, even if Nightmare isn't exactly a fan of that format. It's just easier for me to organize my thoughts this way. 🙄

1. Science requires a teleological worldview.
2. Dismantling that teleological assumption.
3. An attempt to seize control.
4. A lack of foundation and any sense of value.
5. The decline of the West.
6. The postmodernist response.

1. Honestly, I don't see why science needs to assume the world has an inherent purpose, much less that the Creator designed it. For science to function, all you really need is to assume there's an external reality—which is impossible to prove, sure, but it works as a working hypothesis; a little common-sense pragmatism goes a long way. You also have to assume the universe isn't pure chaos—meaning laws exist—and that our cognitive abilities are actually up to the task of grasping those patterns. I realize those are shaky assumptions, but the point remains: purpose or a Creator aren't prerequisites for scientific inquiry.
2. That mostly holds up. However, losing a sense of purpose isn't the same thing as falling into total chaos. Just because there isn't some grand cosmic Goal or Meaning out there in Space doesn't mean Space itself has become chaotic. The same physical laws apply to a Christian and an atheist alike. So, why shouldn't we both try to figure them out?
3. Trying to take matters into our own hands isn't some modern phenomenon; it’s just part of being human. The real question is simply what tools we have at our disposal to do it.
4. I can't go along with that one. Purely from a logical standpoint, Ivan Karamazov is right when he says, "If God is dead, everything is permitted." But that doesn't mean he's necessarily correct in practice. Many values are recognized as "good" across almost all human societies—meaning, aside from our destructive impulses, the intuition toward doing good is also baked into human nature. And you don't strictly need to believe God made us to be decent to one another.
5. People are constantly crying about the fall of the West, but I don't really see it happening. Sure, there are plenty of disruptive trends, but it seems to me there's still a "healthy core" holding things together, despite everything.
6. How is being incomprehensible and grumpy supposed to be an exit strategy from anything? Wouldn't it be better to actually try and build something? On this point, I agree with the critique regarding the pessimism of Western thinkers mentioned in that essay published in the Comma (my third link).

That's about it for now. My brain is starting to feel a bit fried. 😠 Maybe next time...

I don't know how much noise this actually made, but it feels to me like scientific positivism just took a massive hit. A paper was recently published in a scientific journal that was entirely the work of a computer. Basically, the machine framed the problem and conducted the entire "investigation" itself.

Do you have any specifics?

What's there even to say about it? If I bring up Heidegger saying "science does not think, science calculates," you’ll probably just roll your eyes. But what do we say if a computer actually *is* thinking? Maybe it's philosophizing now, too?

Look, I've never been some wide-eyed optimist regarding the ultimate reach of science—in short, I don't think we're ever going to stumble upon a final, all-encompassing theory of everything (if anything, I suspect many questions will remain forever beyond scientific grasp—hint: consciousness and qualia) and I certainly don't buy into any future scientific utopia. Nor do I think everything in science—especially in day-to-day practice—is sunshine and rainbows. At the same time, it never even crossed my mind to deny the value or necessity of philosophy.

That said, the superficiality bugs me—the intentional misuse of data, the terrible, pseudo-intellectual style, and the endless emptiness found in so many modern "thinkers." But what irritates me most is the malicious criticism and the blatant weaponization of science by people who haven't even bothered to understand what they're writing about (just look at Dawkins' examples). I don't think we should be so quick to sacrifice Enlightenment ideals, no matter how banal they might seem today or how easy they are to tear down. And we especially shouldn't abandon the standards of good science and philosophy that have stood since ancient Greece, despite all the postmodernist chatter about the "end of all grand narratives." I'll stop there before I veer too far into being overly dramatic. 🙄

By the way, regarding machine thought, I'm a pretty hardcore skeptic, even though I am a cognitive psychologist. But that's a whole other "grand narrative" entirely. 😁 😉