The democratic party per se isn’t the problem.

First past the post democracies always result in what we have now. The democratic party will completely disappear under proportional representation. In it’s place you will see a proliferation of the power that is being grimly clasped by the corporate kleptocracy and their minions. Instead of 1% deciding how we manage our society, everyone gets a say.

Personally I would do this but it depends how well you get along with them. Obviously the last thing you want is arguments and sulking. Having your own space to retreat to would be the thing to negotiate ahead of time.

I don’t think it’s necessary to have a formal education in any subject, it’s more of a shortcut in the best case. An open curiosity and some logic for mitigating the biases from our reasoning is probably sufficient.

Superficially that is the appeal of Harris, he is articulate and strong on logic but it will only carry an idea so far. His stance on atheism is a good example of limitations of a purely rational approach to living in the world. I agree with his point that we probably would be better off without religion but we still need some of the spiritual elements. I suppose he would argue that he obtains this from an introspective practice which make his blind spots all the more surprising, given his obvious expertise in the area of self awareness e.g. Waking Up app and book. There’s some interesting insight on this point by the producers of Decoding the Gurus podcast where they recently mused the rise of fascism. One other podcast on the fringe of philosophy that I’ve found entertaining and informative is The Very Bad Wizards, it’s run by scholars for fun but I first became aware of many of the basic philosophical tenets there.

Thanks for the links, appreciate it.

Very interesting and I would not have expected that outcome. In some ways the actions of avowed racists is easier to deal with. If our cards are on the table we can at least have a discussion. The racism that dwells in people and institutions who never admit it is incredibly corrosive.

Reading historical texts about eras where the concept of race didn’t exist as we know it today is refreshing. I suppose they had other problems but the modern conception of race feels like a political tool and completely artificial. So too with gender, it’s encouraging to see kids abandoning those outdated notions.

I also had the feeling we were talking at cross purposes 😂 Language really shows it’s limits when considering these topics, it’s incredibly easy to mangle a sentence and give a completely different idea.

Impressed that you correctly detected the influence of Harris on my thinking although I didn’t read that text in particular. I’m only just getting into this subject as an amateur but it seems that you have studied it formally?

Playing with children can be pretty exhausting. My daughter loved her Lego pirate ship set and had me narrating the lives of ten swashbuckling sailors on the high seas every day. I needed to be on top form or she would catch my day to day continuity errors 😅

Is it a good question though? Even if we set aside the fact that it’s a loaded question, what are we going to do with the information?

It has a similar character to the question ‘what is a race?’. Information that people look a certain way is not particularly useful, on the other hand we feel it viscerally. If we don’t stop to think we end up making unhelpful judgements.

Race, gender, nation states, money, the past and future, these are just concepts and if we confine ourselves to the domain of concepts we run the risk of mistaking them for our actual experience, out in the world. We stop listening and start assuming that our internal narrative is infallible, because it is.

She’s not wrong. At least half the country is dumb as rocks and a good proportion is racist and generally bigoted. America has eroded its international standing to an unprecedented low.

What about the moose knuckle?

This fact alone is so awesome about America. To be fair, I know very little about the UK government. I keep my voting strategy simple: whoever is proposing to get rid of first past the post closely followed by whoever is proposing more bicycle infrastructure. Failing that, whoever I think is going to lose.

There are tools that help you decide how to vote. Waiting until the day comes and searching Joe Biden is hilarious.

The self is synonymous with experience. It’s why the self is simultaneously a substantial entity and completely without substance. We remember what it felt like to be ten years old and yet every single cell that generated that sensation has long since been replaced by adulthood. People who receive traumatic brain injuries can become strangers to their family and even themselves. The self is a contrivance and an emergent property of a neural network. Ever changing, elusive and yet reassuringly familiar.

The last thing I will do is deny anyone else’s experience but it sounds like you want to do that, all the while unaware of where that impulse originates. As if it percolated up into consciousness completely unbidden or did you will it into existence?

I suspect the reason we can’t find the self is the same reason we can’t find the other conceptual objects in our imaginations. They feel real and they are useful but ultimately they are like money, religion, nation states, laws and insurance - purely conceptual and dependent on our shared belief in them.

I’m suspicious of the desire to lean too heavily on concepts such as the self and free will. Much of our societal structures past and present depend on their existence, how else can we accuse others of crime if the perpetrator didn’t have a choice? It wasn’t that long ago that we were prosecuting animals for the crimes listed in our statutes. Currently we don’t believe other animals are capable of this level of agency but nobody has presented any compelling evidence, either way.

I suppose it’s early days for neuroscience but many functions of the mind have been linked with areas of the brain, except the generation of the self. That self seems to come about as a result of time spent in the world and is shaped by it so why can’t we find it? Even if we do find a particular area of grey matter, it’s not as if we will find a self molecule and be able to measure it, that’s not how neural networks operate. The best we can say is the self is an organism with memory, a vehicle for genetic material that has become so complex that it’s unable to discern what it is made of.

If the average mortality continues to fall will we see a situation where the average home owner is a corpse? Half of Americans are already dead from neck upwards.

It’s already popular with a good userbase. Popular with idiots? Hopefully not.

It’s a huge problem. Software engineers need to step up and say no to creating artificial barriers between the user and the device. Electronic and mechanical engineers should be making devices that are repairable.

In my workshop I have switched to buying old industrial tools that don’t have embedded software. These machines were built in a time when people expected to repair their own stuff and keep it working.

It’s difficult to imagine a corporation whose ethics are more toxic than Apple but everyone seems to be following their lead and jumping on this mendacious bandwagon.

Thank you Greta for pointing out what a toxic influence Americans are. They have created disasters everywhere they go. Fuck the British as well.

Fill to the brim with turds

Right. It’s perfectly normal to have difficulty sleeping. We often don’t know why and that’s okay too. In time it will pass, as all things do.