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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Perhaps I’ve not been clear, Werner.
The idea that there is right and wrong appears to me to be untenable. I don’t find it a problem in my life. It appears to me that when someone says that X is right or wrong is when the problems start to arise.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Talking----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Doing
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WBraun
climber
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So you confirmed that you impersonalists always have so many bewildering problems ...... :-)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Talking
Doing
I take Paul's painting as both. I find it evocative and lovely, and did not notice any sidebar advert on the page.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I would imagine it matters to the species you eliminate along the way. You've painted yourself into a corner on this one and now you have to advocate for an abandonment of any responsibility to the planet or any real necessity to preserve your own species. Darwin is rolling in his grave. Our responsibility is to our own survival and that necessitates a certain state of nature. Destroy that state and you are destroyed.
painted into a corner?
perhaps if you understood evolution and natural selection better...
species become extinct all the time, a species "lifetime" is measured in millions of years, there seems to be a record of life back to about 4.1 billion years... so that's a lot of species.
new species come into existence...
I'm not abandoning responsibility for anything, but I am pointing out that we have self-assigned ourselves that role... it isn't something written in evolution.
That we understand evolution (and natural selection) and we understand ecology, and biology, we know full well what affect we have on the planet. We will not be able to help ourselves, however, to fulfill that self-assigned responsibility, as our behaviors are written in our genes, and we will continue until the consequences of those behaviors run full course, which likely results in a very reduced presence of humans, and then none at all.
But with or without humans, and even for the wreckage that humans may leave, life on the planet will go on.
That's remarkable.
As with "Ozymandias," we will leave our monuments in the wilderness, but the differences is that no one will be there to read the inscription...
...as you point out, bees don't read.
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Norton
Social climber
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our's and all life on earth's fate has already been written
our sun will will eventually nova, the earth's oceans will boil as the last remaining life is extinguished with incredible heat, then cool and our planet will rotate through space as an icy ball much the same as countless other planets with or without life in the past
how many times has life started, stopped, started, evolved over and over on distant planets
how many times have beings evolved to the point of enough self consciousness to wonder if they are the only life in what they see in their view of the universe
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WBraun
climber
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our's and all life on earth's fate has already been written
You people are insane.
Who is the writer?
Don't reply because we already know your insane answers as "ultimate" and are not scientific but at the same time, you are giving ultimates.
Thus pure unadulterated scientism and pure fantasy mental speculations germinated in your fertile minds masqueraded as so-called scientific knowledge .....
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Absolut upon absolute upon absolute... This being a new one...
The man saying it can't be done, should never interrupt the man doing it...
The man saying it should not be done, is sometimes wise to stop the man doing it...
Where's the problem?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 5, 2017 - 03:35pm PT
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We don't owe anything to any higher order, nor are we going to receive.
I would agree with that if by higher order you are implying some independent, stand alone fore that causally impart some ethereal mojo into our brainpan by magical means. But we are all - to lesser and higher degrees - capable of transcending our own programming and conditioning and discovering transcendent energies within our selves. What we cannot do is direct the process, any more than we can direct what geysers up in mind and presents itself to awareness. So, yes, we can receive from a well deeper than our thinking and our ego. Some outfits call it grace.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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...our sun will will eventually nova...
actually, it will just puff up a bit (well, ok, probably out to the Earth's orbit) when it exhausts the hydrogen in its core and starts burning the shell hydrogen... nothing spectacular, just main sequence stuff, and eventually it becomes a white dwarf, which is a very interesting object in its own right but not the center of a habitable planetary system
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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What we cannot do is direct the process, any more than we can direct what geysers up in mind and presents itself to awareness. So, yes, we can receive from a well deeper than our thinking and our ego. Some outfits call it grace.
we can put ourselves in a position to accept that awareness, and take the opportunity to exhibit grace.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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. . . any more than we can direct what geysers up in mind and presents itself to awareness
Not sure how to interpret this statement. It seems to exclude focused and critical thinking.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Ed: we can put ourselves in a position to accept that awareness, and take the opportunity to exhibit grace.
Nice. Really nice.
Largo: What we cannot do is direct the process, any more than we can direct what geysers up in mind and presents itself to awareness. So, yes, we can receive from a well deeper than our thinking and our ego. Some outfits call it grace.
+1, also. And somewhere in that is one's consciousness. To call it a well and refer to its infinite depth is at best a characterization. How does one characterize tapping into oneself, anyway? There would be those things (memory, skills, operations) that one is somewhat aware of, and then there is that well that appears to be bottomless. The universe seems to me to be intrinsically / inherently intelligent. The number of "coincidences" that make the universe work seems to be astronomically (galactically) remote. If so, then what we see is utterly unique. Whatever "laws" there are, they are randomly present. Like I said before, it's a pretty strange reality whatever interpretation you come down on.
Nighttime dreams are like that.
P.S. I love ya, Werner Braun.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Artists statements are often not written by the artist ... that's to say they're someone else's statement.
That's a bit cynical. Of the many showing artists I know none has taken someone else's statement for their own. Pick up an anthology of artist's musings like "Art in Theory 1900 -2000" and you'll find any number of extremely articulate statements and manifestos written by artists. The notion that artists only communicate visually through their work is something of a myth. The non communicating brute genius producing beautiful things: wonder where that comes from?
What does this mean?
It means that through Positivist Modernism's compulsion to increasing reduction by the end of the 1960s the glass cube and single plank of minimalism indicated the death of painting and complexity in general and, of course, that didn't work out. Art had mistakenly tied itself to the notion of a modernist "progress" to Utopia.
perhaps if you understood evolution and natural selection better...
Honestly, this is such an anemic way of discussing an idea, tantamount to you can't understand because you don't know what I do. Hardly any kind of argument.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 6, 2017 - 09:07am PT
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. . . any more than we can direct what geysers up in mind and presents itself to awareness
Not sure how to interpret this statement. It seems to exclude focused and critical thinking.
Hey John, I gotta go on location and work today but I'll try and respond to this later. It's a great question and underscores the involuntary arising of information once the mind gets "on task" in terms of wresting down a specific question or problem. It's interesting to see how the creative process works in regards to the mechanical functions of the brain, and with those aspects that are not strictly mechanistic. Not surprisingly, many conflate the two, though introspecting on the creative process sorts out that mistake rather easily.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Michael Shermer's review of Man God (Homo Deus)...
https://theamericanscholar.org/more-than-human/
...
Jordan Peterson on free speech...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
https://youtube/sv17a0uIX2Y
...
The social sciences must get over their biophobia.
"How many [sociology] students were taught that human beings evolved about around 150,000 years ago in Africa? How many know what a gene is? How many can describe Mendel’s laws, or sexual selection? The answer is very few. And, what is worse, many sociologists do not think this ignorance matters."
"In the minds of many sociologists, it is a great sin to “biologize” human affairs... How disgraceful to relegate the complexity and richness of human culture to the grimy bin of biology."
http://quillette.com/2017/03/05/sociologys-stagnation/
"It makes zero sense to exempt sociology majors (and criminology, and economics, and social work, etc.) from a working knowledge of genetics and evolution, and presume that they can be good behavioral scientists without this information."
"Somehow we have allowed the fact that we are social beings to obscure the biological foundations upon which our behavior ultimately rests. Most sociologists are woefully ignorant of even the most elementary precepts of biological science. If we think about biology at all, it is usually in terms of discredited eugenic arguments and crude evolutionary theorizing long since discarded in the natural sciences." -Douglas Massey
Phrase du jour... "self-imposed knowledge vacuum"
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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"Somehow we have allowed the fact that we are biological beings to obscure the sociological foundations upon which our behavior ultimately rests. Most scientists are woefully ignorant of even the most elementary precepts of the humanities. If we think about the humanities at all, it is usually in terms of discredited woo arguments and crude notions of subjectivity theorizing long since discarded in the humanities." -Paul Roehl
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Paul,
Did you read the Brian Boutwell piece?
I would not have bothered, either, but needed to find out who would associate biology with grime.
Grime is a genre of music that emerged in East London in the early 2000s. It developed out of earlier UK electronic music styles, including UK garage and jungle, and also draws influence from Jamaican dancehall, reggae, and hip hop.
After reading the HFCS link, I was impressed by the effort to balance biology and sociology, and by the tempest stirred up by the effort.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Most scientists are woefully ignorant of even the most elementary precepts of the humanities
Pretty funny. Beaker boys & Labcoats.
We're an ignorant lot.
;>)
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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FWIW, a Jordan Peterson encore...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ncZ9IJm1oc
FWIW II, there's an upcoming showdown between Harris and Peterson, Round II, that many are looking forward to (where both, imo, are going to take pains to better relate to each other ala a dose of humility each).
Aside, imo, J Peterson brings to the conversation an interesting, unique, impressive way of talking that combines/juggles science AND the humanities, incl mythology and political science... with an emphasis on "what matters" and "what works" in addition to "what is."
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