Choose a topic





.. Epistemology
Language and thought

.. Art
Fake art

.. Cognition
General Artificial Intelligence
Observing My Experience

.. Computers
Microsoft

.. Economics
National Debt.

.. Epistemology
22 Theories of Consciousness
Consciousness defined
Correlation vs Causation
Dialectics and Evolution
Everything contains the seeds of it's own destruction
Free Will
Intentional Stance
Mental Telepathy
Projection
Subliminal Suggestion
Training vs learning
Validation
We cannot escape stories
What is a Vegetable?
Why Do We Like Pictures?

.. Evolution
Life is Amazing
Swarms
What is a Species?
Why are Tropical Birds So Colorful

.. HUM
A Mind

.. Philosophy
Amateur Philosophy

.. Politics
Silos
Strikes
Unelected Bureaucrats
Who Decides an Election?
Why Are So Many of Our Relationships Adversarial?

.. Science
The Sense of Balance

.. Society
Adversarial Legislatures
Altruism
Borders
Control
Cut Energy Use
Emotional Plague
Entropy and Life
Gender
Genocide
Getting Old
Improving Democracy
Jesus and the Money Changers
Merry Christmas
Misinformation and disinformation
Moral Hazard
Pay
Privacy
Red flags
Red Rover Red Rover
Religion in Schools
Reusable Bags
Sleeping in a tent
Social Media
The Myth of Leadership
We Live in Interesting Times
What is Wrong with Merry Christmas

.. teems
Cars made bicycles possible

... evolution
Philosophy of Plants

...HUM
Culture is Ordinary

Art
AI and Art
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Excellence is a Plateau
Is this picture real?
NonFungible Tokens
Public Art
Tearing Down Statues
Weave
What is Art?
Working With Reality

Cognition
Artificial Intelligence and the Collingridge Dilemma.
Bird Brains
Bounded Rationality
Competence Without Comprehension
Consciousness is More Like Fame Than Television
Developmental Processes
Emergence and Cognition
Gender dysphoria
Genius
GIGO
I Lost My Knife
Illusion
Incomplete Information and Stories
Instinct
Intelligence and Motivation
Is free will an illusion?
Metarepresentations
Natural Law
Necessary Illusions
On Affordances
Pencil and Paper
Post Phenomenology
Reflective Equilibrium
Return of the Law of Forms
Shifting Meanings
Structures of Understanding
Superstition
Taking Things on Faith
The Hard Problem
The I Love You Gesture
The Imagined Order
The Phenomenology of Swim Bladders.
Thinking about medical procedures
Thinking About Risk
Underdetermination and Redundancy
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
What Does Google Know?
What is going on?

Economics
A Country Is Not Like A Company
Alternate ideas lying around waiting for disaster
Blood and Money
Can Capitalism Survive?
Do Our Minds Own Our Bodies?
Everyday Communism
Inflation
Invisible Hand
Job Creators
Job Destroyers
Markets
Money and Value
Money is Different
National Accounts
Necessary Production
Paper Wealth
Post Capitalist Society
Profit Motive Fails
Rentier Capitalism
Social Wealth vs Surplus Value
Spending Money Into Existence
The Metaphysics of Money
The Ontology of Debt
Thinking about Money
Wealth is What Money Buys

Environmentalism
Blowing Up Pipelines

Epistemology
Absolute Knowledge
Equivalence
Exists
I do not know everything
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
Rethinking Knowledge
Rethinking Knowledge
Semiotics and Body Language
The Curious Ineffectiveness of Facts
The Past and the Future.
Uncertainty and Unpredictability
Unpredictability
Verificationism
Whatever happened to The Truth?

Epistmology
Dire Warnings

Evolution
Body Plans
Competition and Cooperation
Dr Malthus would be pleased
Error Correction
Evolution Defended
Evolution is not Religion
Evolution of Cars
Extinction
Forces of Nature
Is Natural Selection Obsolete?
Networks
Omicron
Politics and Evolution
Roles
Temes
The Evolution of Purpose.
The Problem with Natural Selection.
The Source of Bad Behavior
Thinking about Tails
Why Does a Leopard Have Spots?
Wildlife

Freedom
Free Speech in the age of Twitter
Freedom and Badness
Freedom and Morality
Freedom From and Freedom To
Freedom in the Age of Convoys
Laws
Libertarian Coercion

HUM
10 Views of Landscape
Affect and Effect
Dataism
I pay rent.
Listening to Corn
The Reform vs Revolution Paradox
What is Public Schooling For?

Levels of Abstraction
Levels of Abstraction and Minds
What is a newspaper?

Mathematics
As Much As Possible
Zipfs Law

Memetics
Emotional Plague
Memes: Imitated Behavior.
The Problem with Memes
What is a replicator?

Morality
Beyond Rules Based Morality
Freedom and Morality
Moral Realism.
What do we owe animals?

pending
Police

Philosophy
Agency
Being
Maps and Territories
Metaphysics Without Absolutes
Philosophy Buds
Ratchets
Sincerely Held Beliefs
Sorites Paradox
Stereoscopic Vision and The Hard Problem
The Gorilla in the Room of Science
The Purpose of Science
What is Going On?

Politics
If It Walks Like a Duck
Right Wing Freedom
The Sovereign Citizen
Tyranny of the Majority

Programming
Loopsidaisy

Science
Constructed Life
Correlation Wins
Fields
Neurophilosophy
Quack Doctors
The Great Shattering
The Material Space
Thinking about Interconnection
Time
Too Small to See
UFOs
Watching Pigeons
Weirdness in Physics

Society
A Job
A society needs a government.
Antisemitism
Babies and Bathwater
Belly of the Beast
Civilization
Compassion
Conservative
Corruption
Cultural Appropriation
Disinformation
Drag Story Tellers
Family Values
Governance
Governance and Power
Griefers and Misinformation and Disinformation
Homelessness
I Distrust the News
Immigration
Inclusion and Christmas
Indigenous
Its a Free Country
Life Extension
Magic
Moral Decline
Open Society and Falsification
Parents, Children, and Community
Possessions
Prisons
Privacy
Race
Rethinking Rights
Rules in a Knife Fight?
Sex and Gender
Should We Go to Mars?
Social vs Individual Responsibility.
Society and The State
Society evolved
Spheres of Influence
Swimming
The Care and Feeding of Free Speech
The Collingridge Dilemma
The Common Good
The Dual Meaning of Power
The Homeless
The Problem with Hedonism
The Rule of Law.
Thoughts on Justice
To the Moon
Totalitarianism
Trial by jury
Virtue Signalling
Voting
We Live in the Present
What is to be said?
What made freedom a bad word?
Why is there a shortage of nurses?
Work - Productive, Useful, Worthless, and Bad.

UBI
Implications of Very Productive Technology
Modest Proposal
Problems with Universal Basic Income
Tormenting Unlucky People
Why there are oligarchs







Genocide

Maybe we need a better term

I was raised just after the 2nd world war and the Holocaust was a vivid cultural memory. Genocide was the Holocaust - the rounding up of Jews and killing them enmasse in ovens and gas chambers.
When I was in high school I had many Jewish friends and I'm sure they all had relatives who died in the Holocaust but we didn't talk about it. But during the 7 day war in 1967 we were all cheering for Israel. Not just my Jewish friends but everyone.
I would have loved to have been a member of a communal group like a kibbutz.
I remember at that time being vaguely aware of Palestinians being displaced from their orchards. The idea was that the Jews knew how to make the desert bloom rather than be satisfied with mere olive orchards.
And that justified the displacement.
It wasn't until quite a while after that I realized just what that displacement meant.
I didn't realize the injustice involved and the rage that was caused among Palestinians.
That rage became apparent when Palestinians attacked the Israeli team, commando style, at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

I'm an amateur looking at this. I have read the news avidly for 60 years now and many many books and articles so I've built up an image of what went on then that I think is pretty accurate but is also at odds with my ideas in high school.

I didn't realize then that Zionism had been promoting the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine since before WW1. They could see the anti-semitism coming in Europe even then. I think Zionists thought - Palestine is the only place on Earth that we have any claim to - we lived there 2000 years ago and are in diaspora now and need to return

Of course - in the meantime Palestine had been occupied by other people.
The early Zionists worked by buying up land. Seems normal. But - they were buying the rights to the land from a headman who then went to live in Monaco leaving the villagers in the lurch. And the purchasers were not individuals - rather they were big organizations set up for the purpose of taking over Palestine as a Jewish homeland..

(An exercise for the reader - imagine that the Zionists had set their sights on Idaho as their homeland - there is nobody there but Indians and Americans - but I digress.:-)

Israel is now at war with Hamas after Hamas' horrific attack of a music festival on Oct 7. Over 1000 people were brutally murdered in that attack and hundreds of hostages were taken. That's bad by any measure. Israel has responded with bombing attacks on one of the most densely populated places on earth. Over 23000 Palestinians are dead and counting.

Israel is being charged with genocide. Israel is denying that and saying that they have a right to defend themselves.

Let's recall that the Holocaust forms the popular image of genocide. Six million people died by execution. Many millions more fled Europe to escape it. All of the Jews in Germany were affected. Most of the Jews in Europe were I'd say. I know that Jewish people don't like it much when every catastrophe is a 'holocaust' - it sort of trivializes the word.


The death toll in Gaza is small compared to the Holocaust.
And to be honest, it looks to me like Hamas was using Palestinian civilians as a huge human shield from which they could strike at Israel with impunity.
The situation in Palestine is nothing like the Holocaust. The Jews in Germany were not bombing anybody. It can be seen as a war.

We have a new term now; ethnic cleansing.
My memory only goes back 60 years but and I was just reading the news, but in that time I read about North Ireland, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the Rohingya . . . all examples of ethnic cleansing. And these are distinct from the many wars that went on in the same period. We might call the Holocaust an extreme example of ethnic cleansing.

What distinguishes a genocide is an active attempt by one group to literally kill off members of another group because of their membership. The Holocaust is an extreme example.

Israel, under the Zionists, didn't round up the Palestinians and execute them. Instead they made life impossible and walled them off from their land and cooped them up in Gaza. That was ethnic cleansing but not quite a genocide. It certainly did set up a situation ready to explode.

Now the Zionists are encouraging the Palestinians to leave. Who knows where they would go? That could turn into a genocide without the mass murder ovens by destroying the Palestinians as a people. Is more warfare the best way forward?

With warfare it's kind of like "full speed ahead - we gotta win - consequences be damned". But then the consequences always rear up behind you and bite. People fighting wars also have the conviction that they have the power to prevail. That belligerent conviction blinds people - they get into a mood of; you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Somehow we need to find a way to start considering the consequences. It would help a lot if we started paying more attention to the problems under our noses and solving them in a mutually beneficial way without the illusory sense of power that war presents.

It's like - C'mon people. Can't we all find a way to get along?

What do you think?

Star I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life. I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it. Each week I write a short essay to set the topic. I show a selection of them here.

I've been thinking and reading about philosophy for a long time but I'm mostly self taught. That is I've had the good fortune to read what interests me rather than follow a course of study. That has it's limits of course but advantages. It doesn't cost as much and is fun too.

My interests are things like evolution and cognition and social issues and economics and science in general.