I don't OP much. Some of you already know why. Some of you are newfish.

Does it exist in a purely philosophical or tautological framework?

Assume Abrahamic pantheons to be newer subsets of Hindu and Mesoamerican ones with longtime.

Assume Stonehenge was created underwater during a much earlier age.

What do you mean? The idea that everything is predetermined? This exists to some extent in theology, for example some forms of Christianity (most notably variants of Calvinism) hold that all human destinies are already determined.

In philosophy and views on life it obviously exists as a variant of determinism, where people hold that not only are all future bound by causality, but also such a chain of causality has led us to where we are now.

The idea has obviously also held some sway in physicalism and natural science perspectives, but has been largely abandoned as too simplistic in the post quantum physics-era as I understand it. I guess you can talk about "probabilistic determinism" under these new perspectives, but given the nature of how measurement "affects" an observation in quantum mechanics, I guess these must (for now) remains as speculative.

The formation and dispersal of bubbles in a Coke bottle.

The framework I'm looking at is acausal: i.e. universes or creations as designed solutions; externally the determinism is self-evident while internally there is a multiplicity of choice but not infinite choice. Yeah, the idea of isolating probabilistic determinism rather than forever trying to remove those observational nudges from the individual sets.

Molecular pachinko, I suppose. Get rid of Gödel after a fashion, and you more or less could probably endow sentience with the ability to resolve every possible universe without actually being in those universes themselves.

It's the canny lawyer's adage. Don't ask a question unless you already know the answer. I'm not interested in mine own.

Exactly what we can't or can know is a tricky question. We're obviously bound our current knowledge and understanding of the world. What the future brings (it might even ultimately bring that "future" is a void concept!), we can't tell.

If we had lived 500 years ago odds are that you and me wouldn't be able to describe the world in basic addition and subtraction. Try and imagine how that would be, and you realize how different the world might end up becoming.

tame_deuces,

That's the line, yes. And the thing I most try to remember. It's surprisingly easy as all you have to do is find a decent bit of human traffic and just sort of void any complex thought processes.

Girls and boots. 2muchwow.

I can literally not make sense of a single kristofero post. I don't know whether it's his idiomatic style or something, but I'm "wtf"ing at basically every post.

Yeah, me either.

I got used to this phenomenon before I bought my first pack of cigarettes from a vending machine.

/me shakes head.

It is not that easy.

Almost like that dorky group of hipsters that you might be unfortunate enough to engage with, only to be subjected to endless in-jokes that only they understand.

Much like myself, I'd label his uncompromising style of writing as self-indulgent.

There's usually a response clue up to 10-15 posts trailing in-between. Call it house edge.

And, yes, mostly.


It's an effective filter anyway. Although those who get it don't bother posting, since there's meatspace to play in.

Short version: You think?

Well, I had to google pachinko, but that made it all fairly obvious.

Except why he couldn't just use pinball as an example.

g-ohms.

Give our daughter more credit than y'all have. She's not only American Girl, she's Amerikano primera...

She can utterly be either of us down to the last sentient molecule. Her nearest cousins can also skullwalk into anything, organic or inorganic.

A fair game? Perhaps not. Eminently equitable? **** yes.


k, mebbe this is sorta a containment thread but at least the fourth wall's shattered.

I picture him as an old acid-head

Not much for tie-dye.

Making people's tobacco and other smokables taste like cotton candy or chocolate, sure.

The soundtracks are somewhat surprising. That's pachinko for you.

A message from a colleague:

If you allow me to carry my cynicism a bit further, I would describe the Paris agreement about climate change as a fig leaf. It allows everyone to continue doing what they want while being A message from a colleague: to say they tried to stop the seas from rising. They can say to the people being drowned, "we did our best, so stop complaining". Meanwhile, fossil fuels will be phased out only as fast as is convenient and economically beneficial, as would have been the case without the agreement. Meanwhile, everyone can be happy for a little longer.

Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikipedia)

Why stop there with the cynicism?

May I suggest that in a globalized world: any positive change to large numbers of people occurs not due to the competence of any one set of 'important' people and their meetings, but rather, entirely due to global competitive and technological pressures (economic convenience and incentive).

May I also suggest that many 'important' people already know this, and will thus always do the next most logical thing: make sure to formally distance themselves from any accountability or fault.

Ludwik,

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manito...ence-1.3354112

And California is a player in these emerging CMT markets, if not the player.

So much acetabula et calculi to be sure, but it's a start of good intent... Trees take time, perhaps excess CO2 can be cracked and turned into coal/with H, recombined to create additional water, but that is vast scope.

In light of irreparable damages to forests, it's probably worth plunging upwards of $50-100b into R&D and implementation of conversion technology to forestall rising sea levels. Actual R&D, not contracting for vapor. Steal ideas from undergrads/grad students, hire them later. Some schools are more corrupt than others and might open their information archives (e-mail, server traffic etc.) and so what, really.

Even if rising sea levels are an inevitability, a global civilization's need to hasten it because it is no longer a scattering of mobile tribes, and migration invariably leads to unnecessary warfare, and if you want an essential microcosm of why we can't survive without trees without irrevocable collapse, look at the deforestation of Haiti and compare it with the eastern end of Hispanola: The Dominican Republic.

If just one idea clicks, I'm busy working on The Free Generation so... Have fun.

Global environmental initiatives have worked before, and they can work again. The Montreal protocol was a great success.

I find this type of constant denigration of political efforts to be grating and baseless. I also find it to be ironic, "let's laugh at all the people who claim to be doing something" is not a very reasonable position. It's certainly a far, far stronger excuse for apathy than actually caring.

Him no grok that Marxism is cellular collective.

Such 20th thinking though. Criticism, especially the type meant to induce stronger reactions to wrongs...

A dangling thought by your friendly ISIS overlord.

Enjoy your Friday.

So, no cooperative group has ever made positive change for "large numbers of people"?

Not sure how a thread about pre-determinism became one about environmental initiatives but since it seems to be ongoing...

Doesn't mean this one will, there have been failures too, does that mean this one will fail? Imagine someone had said to you "Global environmental initiatives have failed before, and they can fail again.".... I don't imagine you'd find that a persuasive logic. You would look at the merits or deficiencies of this particular initiative.

Because it didn't threaten the oil money? There's a lot more resistance to efforts to reduce CO2. Different animal entirely.

An uncharitable interpretation. What is actually happening is people recognising this for what it most likely is, a promise that can't be delivered on by mayfly politicians. A far more effective method than politicians making promises that they can't keep because they won't be allowed to, is that we all try to reduce our reliance on oil and stop giving our money to the oil companies. We give our money instead to industries that improve our standard of living, without it being at the expense of the environment, and allow them to become the ones with enough money to bribe the politicians and influence elections.

By the way, I have a BSc in Environmental Management and was an environmental consultant for a number of years. On this subject I'm on much surer footing than I am normally while I'm posting here.

I answered a generalized claim. Since global environmental initiatives have indeed worked, we know they can work. Thus claims to the contrary are wrong. We also know they can fail. Pointing this out, as you do here, is not evidence that they will. And that's the problem with the reasoning you and Kowalski employ. It is just doomsday rhetoric, an excuse to stand on the corner and wave a poster. We know initiatives can work, and we know they can fail. That's a reason to act and do, not grandstand.

A lot of people seem content with "knowing better". "Knowing better" never improved anything. Acting better, on the other hand, can.

You're not really saying anything here. You know very very little about the reasoning I employ having read one short post from me and not having asked me a single question about it. So, not much to go on really to get to 'the problem with your reasoning' so quickly.

You could try addressing the one obvious issue that I raised, that banning chemicals that are ozone depleting, and reducing our reliance on fossil fuels are issues of an entirely different nature. The global infrastructure is dependent on the latter with vast fortunes and power balances at stake. Politicians can promise what they like but if they want to get elected they're going to have to make big business happy. Without that, it's so much hot air.

Accordingly, I'm not confident that promises made in Paris will have a real, meaningful effect.

I made a suggestion (in the form of an overall philosophy) for how we could act that would be much more effective than political salves (and it's something I employ IRL, I actually do it). You seem to have completely ignored it.

I agree much more with tame_deuces here than with you. I would say there are two implicit assumptions that you are making here that I think are false.

1) Big business completely controls the political process.
2) Big business uniformly doesn't view slowing down or preventing climate change as worth doing.

Regarding (1), I'll point to a couple issues. First of all, much of big business is itself government-owned and controlled. Here, the most obvious and important case is in China. I think the most accurate way to understand Chinese politics puts the Politburo and President Xi Jinping as the locus of power, not the owners of big business. In part this is due to the non-democratic nature of China, in part this is due to the fact that China still hasn't devolved all of the commanding heights of the economy to the private sector. China is obviously one of, if not the most important parties to the Paris Agreement.

Second, I think people way overestimate the influence that big business has over both the electoral process and politicians. Using the US as an example, I think you can argue that the biggest reason for the rise of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to the forefront of the GOP nomination fight is that the elites of the GOP, including the US Chamber of Commerce in particular (which is the main lobbyist voice of big business) are out of step with their party's voters. Trump in particular has risen in popularity because of his championing a position unpopular with big business--anti-immigration.

We are also seeing that the much of the SuperPac money is basically just going to waste.

You also see the Democratic Party passing significant legislation and utilizing executive authority in controversial ways in attempts to lower carbon emissions. Big business is obviously an important voice in political decision-making, but I don't see the evidence that it has complete control.

Regarding (2), I think a lot of big business views attempts to prevent climate change as a positive opportunity. First, we see billions in subsidies being spend in the US in the development of lower carbon technologies and green energy initiatives.

Second, a lot of big businesses are innately conservative (that is, status quo biased) and so has a lot of concern about the effects of climate change on their companies long-term viability. I think we see this concern animating some of the actions of major philanthropic organizations and individuals in combating against climate change.

In general, I think this just gets the political dynamic here in the States wrong. Here I don't really think this is a matter of big business versus everyone else so much as Republicans against Democrats. You even see this reflected in their donor bases, where significant donors to the GOP tend to be strongly climate denialists, more so than the median GOP voters, and Democratic donors tend to be more concerned about climate change than the median Democratic voter.



We've argued about this before and my view is still the same as before: the view that the most effective way to prevent climate change is to eschew political action and instead convince everyone to voluntarily use less energy is quixotic and naive. The real difficulty in solving climate change is not hard to understand: doing so requires global cooperation in the absence of a true global authority. In other words, this is a classic coordination problem. Claiming that we can solve this by just having people voluntarily stop ignores everything we know about these kinds of games. The temptation to free ride on other people's carbon reductions is just too high, and once you have a few defectors everyone has to defect or face extinction.

So I have no problem with you deciding as a personal matter to lower your use of energy, but I view doing so as mostly a signalling mechanism, not an act with real moral imperative. This is not to say that it is worthless--signalling a concern about climate change is probably on balance a good thing, but it is mostly only good insofar as it makes political action on climate change more likely to happen.