Sea level and evolution show that reality is shades of gray, not black and white

One of the reasons why I've come to dislike religions so much is that they're so prone to making absolutist statements. 

God is.... blah, blah, blah. The commandments to follow are... blah, blah, blah. You can tell good from evil by...blah, blah, blah. That's all bullshit, regardless of what the blah, blah, blah consists of. 

I say this for a couple of reasons.

One obvious reason is that religions don't deal in truth, they deal in fantasy. They make stuff up, then expect people to believe in it. If they don't, bad things are supposed to happen: hell, damnation, God's wrath.

Another more subtle reason is that reality isn't marked by sharp distinctions akin to the difference between black and white. While reality may seem that way at first glance, a closer look reveals shades of gray. 

Examples abound. 

A vacuum in deep space isn't really empty, but is filled with ephemeral quantum particles popping in and out of existence. Sexual desire isn't homosexual and heterosexual, but includes other varieties such as bisexual. The big bang wasn't a single moment of creation, but is ongoing as space continues to expand some 14 billion years later.

Here's a few more examples drawn from articles I read recently in The New Yorker and New Scientist. 

The New Yorker article by Brooke Jarvis is called "Sea Change: What the search for sea level tells us about living on our changeable planet." The Compass app on my iPhone tells me that I'm at 360 feet elevation. But what am I elevated above?

Well, sea level. Just about everybody knows that elevation refers to the distance above sea level. Few people, though, wonder about how sea level is measured, me certainly included. The article describes how difficult this is.

The oceans rise and fall with the tides, which are caused by the moon. Some places in the ocean are higher than others. Because of how our planet bulges as it spins, "the water levels of equatorial seas are some twenty-one kilometers higher than the sea ice at the North Pole." The oceans expand when warmer and shrink when cooler. Melting ice sheets raise the ocean level while growing ice sheets lower it.

It was only in 1929 that the U.S. adopted a shared reference for setting mean sea levels around the country; it was derived from calculations based on twenty-six tidal stations and 106,724 kilometres' worth of coastline surveying.

The article is based in part on a book about the quest to determine sea level.

"There is no progress to be found in the story this book tells, no constant improvement of knowledge, no approach to a more 'real' system of reference," von Hardenberg writes in his introduction. Instead, there's a story of people abandoning a belief in some perfect natural reference point as it slowly becomes  evident how complicated and changeable the planet on which they live truly is.

The line between the land and the ocean, after all, has never been fixed; it is a binary abstraction we impose on a place that, as Rachel Carson wrote, is forever "changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea." For animals and plants that make their homes in the intertidal zone, survival depends on flexibility, on adapting to a world in which the only constant is inconstancy.

The New Scientist article by Colin Barres is called "Becoming Human." Subtitle: "What is a human and when did such a being emerge? These fundamental questions about ourselves are surprisingly difficult to answer."

Our species is called Homo sapiens. But there have been other species in the genus Homo. DNA testing, such as via the firm Ancestry, shows this. Five years ago I got my DNA tested. I was mainly interested in where my recent relatives came from, but the test also showed a much more distant heritage: like most people, I have some Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. 

So I'm mostly Homo sapiens, but not entirely. This indicates how it is difficult to draw a hard and fast distinction between who is "human" and who isn't. The article goes into this problem at some length, ending with:

A century after the discovery of the Taung Child, and 50 years after Lucy, we seem no closer to understanding when or why humans emerged. That is frustrating, but also, paradoxically, a reflection of how much progress has been made.

When researchers had just a handful of hominin fossils to work with, it was easy to spot the significant differences between them and to assume that there was a dramatic moment when our ancestors became human. It is because we have better evidence that we now know things are more complicated.

What is clear is that we didn't suddenly "become human" 2.9 million years ago when A. afarensis died out. That should come as no surprise. Evolution is a continuous process, and the propensity to divide life up into conspicuously distinct species and genera is less a reflection of fact than another human idiosyncrasy. 

Ultimately, where we draw the line between "us" and "them" isn't simply a biological question -- it is a philosophical one too.

Comments

[um]

growth = slow and almost invisible => objectivation of movement

action = intervention in objectivated movement

The mind is made to handle, objects and if objectivate movement does not result in an recognizable object being ambiguous, it will force the senses into a black or white choice so that decision and [survival] action is possible.

Whatever the mind creates, the abstracts, like culture, being an abstract replica of nature are all without exception related to ...survival.

Democracy, like religion are all of the minds instruments of action to survive. ..mentally

Whatever we do, think and feel is survival, maintenance of live or ditruction in order to survive.

Religion, is just an means to an end.

[Appreciative Reader]

Yes, the edges of species are always blurred never clean. You can never point to an evolving species and say, this here individual creature's of the parent species P, and its offspring's of the child species C. There's blurring every which way.

Nor is this limited to evolution. As you say, that's a feature of reality. You can never point at the precise day when childhood gives way to youth, or youth to middle age; and yet these divisions, which are human inventions, nevertheless can be very useful. And very real: that is, that the edges are blurred does not mean that the demarcation is invalid; and we may well put in arbitrary lines in the sand for definitional purposes, like xth birthday, or yth hour, or z% of Neanderthal DNA (as opposed to Sapiens), or whatever.

...Heh, yes, that's actually a brilliant insight, albeit simple enough, that above. ...No, not my own, but Dawkins', as discussed in his Selfish Gene and Watchmaker, and touched on in his Delusion.

[sant64]

If Sapolsky’s radical revisionism threatens to eliminate our moral vocabulary altogether, the traditional compatibilist approaches can err in the other direction: they can deny us grounds for reforming our practices of moral judgment. So we might want to ask—in the philosophical tradition not of positivism but of pragmatism—about the “cash value,” the practical uses, of invoking free will. Ignore the many things we say about free will and focus on what we do. By attending to our practices, we can conduct a more profitable line of inquiry: What do we need free will to be?

Consider these questions. How does my response to a student who has failed to meet a deadline change when I discover that she sprained her wrist the day before? How do I respond to a piece of fruit chucked at me when I discover that the chucker is two years old? How vehemently do I press for a tough prison sentence when I learn that the defendant was abused as a child? Is there a difference between someone jumping into a pool and being pushed in? Between falling in after he stepped on a banana peel and falling in because he was drunk?

In each of these situations, we can ask whether the person in question had or lacked something called “free will.” But look back at the factors that seemed to undermine the exercise of free will: rotten luck, immaturity, circumstance, coercion, accident, and incapacity. When the terms on the obverse side of the contrast are so disparate, it’s hard to be confident that there really is a single thing called “free will” whose presence or absence we can meaningfully debate.

The philosopher J. L. Austin, in a paper titled “A Plea for Excuses,” observed that, though it’s tempting to view “freedom” as a positive term requiring elucidation, we tend to use it just to rule out one of these miscellaneous antitheses. Freedom’s just another word for no excuses. In Austin’s spirit, you can wonder how much would be lost if we ceased talking about free will altogether and spoke more specifically of what we meant. “He was not acting of his own free will,” you tell me. “What do you mean?” I ask. “Was he being held at gunpoint? Sleepwalking? High on narcotics?” “Oh, no,” you say, “I just mean he’s a toddler.” Maybe you should have just said that. Maybe, in other words, there is no one thing that we need “free will” to be.

Sapolsky’s most persuasive passages remind us of the many modest changes that we have made to our practices in light of advances in our understanding of certain facts about ourselves. Things got better for people with epilepsy once we learned that the condition was not a form of demonic possession that was “brought on by someone’s own freely chosen evil.” Things got better for people with schizophrenia (and for their families) once it was recognized that the condition was at base a biochemical disorder, not a product of faulty mothering. Some of our current moral conceptions and presumptions may come to seem just as confused. We may currently be blaming people whom it would be better to treat, tolerate, or simply avoid.

Or, perhaps, better to forgive. That was, after all, part of Sapolsky’s case for his new morality: free-will skeptics are “less punitive and more forgiving.” To understand all, he might have said, is to forgive all. But he can’t have really meant that. Forgiveness is, as much as vengeance, a concept that can be applied only from within the first-person point of view. If free-will skepticism means never having to say you’re sorry, then it also means never being forgiven. Sapolsky’s ethic of forgiveness demands that we retain something of our old-fashioned belief in holding one another responsible.

The traditional project of compatibilist philosophers has been to treat determinism, free will, and moral responsibility as fixed parts of a triad and to search for ways to reconcile them. The skeptics, seeing an irresolvable contradiction, have concluded that the whole idea of moral responsibility has to go. But there are other ways of reconciling scientific and moral inquiry. It may be that we need a suppler and more humane approach to holding one another responsible, an approach that takes more seriously what our best scientific accounts tell us about ourselves. We needn’t follow the skeptics to the conclusion that the best morality would be no morality at all to recognize that our current morality remains a work in progress. ♦

(google krishnnan new yorker for complete review)

[Appreciative Reader]

"google krishnnan new yorker for complete review"

Or just click this link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/13/determined-a-science-of-life-without-free-will-robert-sapolsky-book-review

Hint: When you're quoting verbatim from elsewhere, then how you generally attribute is by directly mentioning your source, the title, page number, etc --- in this case, simply your link. Which presumably you've got open in front of you, since you've copied verbatim from it. Simply presenting the link is both very much easier for you to do --- just click copy, then click paste --- as well as for us to reference.

(It's good that you've presented that roundabout attribution, though. Just showing you how it's actually done.)

----------

Now: And before we actually engage with it: This shiny bauble that you hold forth proudly for our inspection: Have you actually understood any of it? If we do take the trouble to engage with it, then are you equipped to engage with that engagement? Or are we to merely admire the shine of your bauble, and further admire you for having picked it up for us?

Let us know, so that we can make up our mind whether or not to actually take the time to engage with this. It looks interesting, and might make for interesting engagement --- provided you've the intellectual bandwidth to actually discuss it.

[Appreciative Reader]

(Apologies if the above sounded ...rough, attacking. Not my intention to run you down. Just, last time when umami had caught on to your copy-paste thing, I'd spent some time reading and responding to it, under the impression that it was you I was engaging with --- as opposed to the author of the article. And nor did you seem to have understood what you were quoting, or what I'd said in response, because there was no further engagement.

Well, before I --- or others that might feel similarly about this --- take the time to engage with this, then it would be good to know if you actually have understood what you're quoting, and whether you can actually talk about it meaningfully if we elect to take the time.

Even if you haven't understood it, and are unable to discuss it, it's still okay for you to post this, because you've attributed this after all --- even if in this unusual format, as opposed to the more usual, and easier, present-the-link format. ...Anyway, your call. This isn't primarily about how you present your source, but about whether you've understood it, and can talk about it. Both now, and in general. If you have, and can, then you'll be much appreciated, and very welcome, as far as I am concerned, and for what that is worth. That the views you present are contrary is a positive not a negative, again as far as I am concerned, and for what that is worth. No one wants an echo chamber --- or a perverse reverse-echo chamber either.)

[um]

>> One obvious reason is that religions don't deal in truth, they deal in fantasy. They make stuff up, then expect people to believe in it. If they don't, bad things are supposed to happen: hell, damnation, God's wrath.<<

Is that not how ALL games, all narratives are played?
Is football, base ball or any other game of sport an fantasy that has to be played according the rules, winners and losers, do's and don'ts?

Is not the whole of the organisation of human activities, brought together in culture, not an collection of narratives, games? From traffic to education, to politics .. you name it.

Even family live and marriage are just an narrative an game, that rules the activities of humans in a particular setting?

Why, for heavens sake, should religion be an exception?
Is religion not and narrative or games played by humans, like any other set of organized activities?

Even war....has to be played according the rules unless the worst come over you.

[Ron E.]

Yes, I believe that evolutionary wise – which includes the oceans – that change is a gradual process and yes, measuring using markers and more recently satellites give some indication over a period of many years, although possibly confounded by the unexpected. I suppose one sure way of determining sea-level is if you happen to live in the Maldives where there is doubt that sea-level rise has and is happening as a perceived fact. The prediction is that it is thought to continue as the planet gets warmer.

As for the rest of nature – including us – evolution does generally need millions of years and although fossils apparently tell us the links we came from, I’ve always understood that species just didn’t pop up but progressed through environmental pressures. Apparently, we all have genetic markers that relate back not only to neanderthals but to chimpanzees and way back with early life, to primitive worm like creatures.

Actually, and perhaps an aside, there is nothing more relevant than present moment experience or seeing (like the Maldives people) unlike the conceptual models we use in science. In Buddhism there is a term – Great Doubt – which is doubting the reality that is perceived through overlaying it with conception. Or, reality, is the way things are prior to conceptualisation.

Great to make assumptions and to follow them through by experimentation – which is the way of science – it can be rewarding, fruitful and great fun, but to really know reality it has to be perceived here now, or as the trite sayings go, ‘this is it’’, or ‘here now’ etc.

[Appreciative Reader]

"Why, for heavens sake, should religion be an exception?"

Because, um, religion makes truth claims. Unlike baseball, unlike music, unlike war per se. If truth claims are made, then it stands to reason that the claimant will be held accountable for those claims.

[um]

@ AR

Religion is, as a narrative, a game, like a treasure hunt.

Treasure hunting etc has also be played by the rules, and it goes also with a claim, a claim that cannot be verified before hand.

The main point is that humans organize their activities in narratives, most of which does make all sorts of promises .. bookshops and the internet are full with .. do as I do, say and you will be .., have xxxxxx

Taking a plain, or having surgery.

In my book it is that simple AR, but that might be caused by the coffee.

There is nothing wrong with religion ... it is just one of the many tools humanity has developed related to survival ... be it body, mind or soul ...and with every tool it can be use in a good and a bad way.

[Appreciative Reader]

Sure, um, religion can be viewed as all of the above. I think I can agree with that, with certain important qualifications and reservations. ...But be that as it may, religion indubitably does make truth claims. And in as much as it makes truth claims, that it isn't able to defend, it is wrong, it fails.

[sant64]

Let me be clear, sea level. it's about the significance of the passage of time, right, the significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children. We will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues of sea level, and to work together as we continue to work, operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements, that we will convene to work together. We will work on this together. We've got to take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are because you have been forced to have taken this seriously. It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.

We must together. Work together. To see where we are. Where we are headed, where we are going and our vision for where we should be. But also see it as a moment to, yes. Together, address the challenges and to work on the opportunities that are presented by this moment.

[Jim]

Here is a simple way to do what RS and others propose to do by Neville Goddard and his book Out of This World.
Drowsiness facilitates change because it favors attention without
effort, but it must not be pushed to the stage of sleep, in which
we shall no longer be able to control the movements of our
attention, but rather a moderate degree of drowsiness in which
we are still able to direct our thoughts. A most effective way to
embody a desire is to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled
and then, in a relaxed and sleepy state, repeat over and over
again, like a lullaby, any short phrase which implies fulfillment
of our desire, such as "Thank you" as though we addressed a
higher power for having done it for us. If, however, we seek a
conscious projection into a dimension ally larger world, then we
must keep the action going right up until sleep ensues

[um]

@ AR

Religion does not make claims.
Like in treasure hunting, Humans make claims.

In order to participate in the narrative or game of hunting, one has to become a hunter.
A sine qua none for a hunter is the [1] believe, conviction there is something to hunt [2] he must have the desire to have it [3] the mental and other attributes that are needed to hunt.

In the hunt he proves to himself that it was succesfull or not,. Nobody else can do that for him and certainly not that what is hunted.

History books etc oral tradition relates of humans that were succesfull in that hunt.

Whether there is something to hunt or not, the hunting itself can be a treasure trove as is shown in the ongoing search for the arc, conducted these days in oak island..
Hahahaha ..a whole team of specialist is participating, millions are watching ...what they do is the high end of gaming, creating narratives, plating the game.

Humans do these things .. they have to pass their time.

[Appreciative Reader]

“Religion does not make claims.
Like in treasure hunting, Humans make claims.”

Haha, no, um, that’s just playing with words! Obviously it is us humans that make claims, not an abstraction like religion. Surely what I meant is clear enough? “Religion makes truth claims” is shorthand for a more precise but more clunky construct that might read something like this: ‘Religions comprise truth claims made by humans’. That linguistic pettifogging is neither here nor there.

This might be interesting, actually. I think you’re making two errors in how you’re thinking about this, um. I’d like to address both, if I may:

----------

First, what you said, above, about treasure hunts. That isn’t what I meant by “truth claims”. Truth claims, in the context of religions, are foundational to religions. What you’re referring to is simply a question of the rules of the game. …Okay, maybe an analogy might come in useful here:

As you know, Catholics queue up to receive their wine and wafers in Church after Mass, Communion, whatever. And they get baptized by being dunked in water. So those are, like, the rules of the game. Should the congregation find, one day, that they are no longer receiving their wafers and wine; or that at the time of baptizing the child merely gets a tap on the head from the priest, and no immersion in water; then that will be …disquieting, unsettling, for many. …Well, that is what corresponds to the children in a treasure hunt game being promised their treasure. Or the players in a game of football being assured of being awarded a goal against their opponent team when they follow rules and correctly send the ball into the goal; or for that matter of being declared the winner if they do this more times than their opponent team.

You see what I’m saying, um? What you refer to as the treasure hunt “claim”, it isn’t a claim per se, and it certainly isn’t a “truth claim”. It’s merely the rules of the game. And that corresponds to, like I said, being given the wafer and wine at the correct time, or being dunked in water during baptism.

The truth claims that religions make --- or, if you insist on that particular nit, then the truth claims that people make in the case of religions --- are foundational to the religion. They consist in the obvious: Claims that God created everything; that God created the world in so many days; that man was created so many thousand years ago; that if you don’t do this and this, then that will happen to you (heaven, hell, the lot). You know, the foundational truth claims of religions.

In as much as religion makes such truth claims, therefore it is held accountable for those claims. And in as much as religion does not actually support or satisfy those truth claims, therefore it is wrong, completely wrong.

To answer the question you’d asked: Why religions are held to their truth claims; while baseball, and music, and war per se, etc are not: is because religions make truth claims, while baseball and music and war per se do not.

…Makes sense?

----------

Moving on to that other point in your comment I wanted to address. Which is essentially the same argument put differently; but since you’ve chosen to put it in those terms, let me now address it in those terms that you use:

“Humans do these things .. they have to pass their time.”

No, um, they don’t do these things, religion I mean, to simply pass the time. Sure, people often do participate in religion as some kind of tradition, out of inertia, etc; but fundamentally, at bottom, religions exist and flourish because, again, people believe their truth claims.

Do you get me? …People play baseball simply to pass the time. They may also do that to secure admissions and scholarships, or to earn money, or to impress girls, etc --- but that again compares with the priest conducting Mass in order to earn his salary. Ultimately, fundamentally, people go to churches, and churches exist, and religions exist, not because people simply want to pass the time of day, but because they believe the truth claims that religions make.

And again, in as much as those truth claims are counterfeit, in the case of religions, therefore religions themselves are counterfeit, and wrong.

It’s like this: If tomorrow the Pope were to go out and announce clearly to the world, not just the once but again and again and again until the message got across clearly to all Catholics: “Look, guys, there’s nothing to the Catholic faith. All our truth claims are counterfeit. Henceforth, we’ll stop making those truth claims. No, God did not make man. God did not create the universe. Jesus was not the Son of God. There was no original sin. Jesus did not die to rid humanity of their original sin. Taking refuge in Jesus will not take you to God. There is no heaven, and no purgatory, and no hell. Following the Commandments may or may not make sense from a commonsense perspective, but they have no divine mandate. I myself, the Pope, am merely the administrative head of this huge sprawling organization, and have no divine mandate from God, and nor do my army of priests.” …And also: “We’ve got these cool churches, and these cool rituals. They’re basically like a game, is all. But they can be fun. They can add cohesion to communities. They can, sometimes, be a force for good, as long as you don’t go all fanatical over them. So come on, guys, come here and spend the time of day. This has absolutely no especial divine significance, but simply to pass the time of day, come participate in our rituals.”

If the Pope were to clearly say this, and if, loosely speaking, religions in general were to clearly say this, then sure, there’d be no truth claims made in that case. In that case, religion would indeed be a narrative like any other, like football and baseball and chess. And in that case, in as much as no foundational truth claims were being made, then naturally they would not be required to live up to those claims, that they’re not making at all.

But that is not the case at all, is it? Religions do, indubitably, make these foundational truth claims. Those truth claims are the very raison d’etre of religions. …Therefore, they are, quite rightly, held accountable for those claims. And in as much as they cannot support those claims, therefore they fail, therefore they are counterfeit, therefore they are wrong.

[um]

@ AR

Have a look at some episodes of "The curse of oak island" or read about it on the internet and you might understand that treasure hunting is not a child's game...and you might understand the analogy made.

[um]

@AR

Humans, and it cannot be state enough, like all other sentient beings and even everything else, are endowed with means to sustain themselves.

I am not at all interested in the establishment, the organisation of any religion but I am interested and also not in the narrative ... but ... what humans do with it and how it came into existence.

I came to see culture as an artificial, abstract copy of nature, and that humans have to survive in their own creation.

In nature humans have to eat, remain save in their environment and so they do in culture ... the problems humans face in nature, they also face in society, in culture ..to cope with it they have developed many tools, invented many things like the wheel and fire.

Religion is akin to these inventions.... ask those that believe in a religion why they believe and what and you will soon understand that it is related to survival.

That is how I look upon these things

Humans believe also in democracy as an tool to live peacefully together .. hahaha

[um]

@ AR

Go to a graveyard and have a look at what people are doing there, ... you might hear them talking to their deceased loved ones as if they are alive and present.

[Appreciative Reader]

“Have a look at some episodes of "The curse of oak island"”

Haha, no, um, most emphatically not! I enjoy talking with you generally, and I’m enjoying discussing this with you now; but there’s no way I’m gallivanting off to another one of your wild goose chases, like that Tao wheelwright story thingie, where not only do you never clarify what you mean, nor do you even evince any interest in my analysis of it, but stay content with imagining that’s wise, when in fact it’s not. No offense, old friend, but absolutely not.

You’d asked why religions are exceptions in terms of being held accountable for truth claims, while games like baseball, and war per se, and music, and relationships, etc are not. I clearly explained that to you. You raised this particular point in response, that I thought was interesting; and I clearly addressed it, in those specific terms that you yourself raised. …Did you understand what I said? You must have, I was very clear in how I addressed what you’d said.

I would have thought my last comment conclusively dealt with this. If it hasn’t, and if you wish to add to this, then by all means do that: but do that in your own words, and do that with reference to my last comment, and do that clearly not with these would-be-ineffably-wise-and-cryptic sidebars. …Again, if language is an issue, feel free to revert to Dutch and translate it; or just present the Dutch and I’ll translate it myself (reverting back to you to ensure I’ve got it right). …There’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t be able to clearly say what you mean to say!

----------Like I said, I’m enjoying talking this over with you, um, absolutely! But I’m not doing that endless wild goose chase thing again. …Go on, just re-read my last comment, properly engage with it, and if you still have something to say, just say it, clearly.

----------

“Religion is akin to these inventions.... ask those that believe in a religion why they believe and what and you will soon understand that it is related to survival.”

Religion is different in one respect: it makes truth claims. I keep telling you this, and you keep ignoring this key part that I keep telling you, and keep talking about random things instead.

I’ll say this one more time: Religion makes truth claims. In this respect it is different than other narratives that do not make truth claims, like sports for example; and it is similar to narratives that also make truth claims, like science. Because religion and science make truth claims, therefore they are held accountable for those claims.

Don’t ignore this key point any more by talking about tangentially related things, please.

----------

“@ AR

Go to a graveyard and have a look at what people are doing there, ... you might hear them talking to their deceased loved ones as if they are alive and present.”

Go on, um complete your thought, spell it out clearly. What have you seen people do in graveyards, and what conclusions do you draw from it, and how does that bear on what we’ve been discussing? Just clearly think that through, and then spell it out; and then we’ll see if you make sense.

I’ll go first: In some cases people go to graveyards and weep, because they’re missing their dear ones, now departed. Sometimes they sit quietly, in silent recollection and homage. Sometimes they pay bloodless pro forma visits. Sometimes they talk with their loved ones, now departed, but not with any delusion that they’re still alive but to simply give expression to the deep connection in their heard for those loved ones. And finally, some go there with woo-woo ideas about their loved ones residing in heaven, or literally there in spirit with them, or some such nonsense. …And the truth claims of religion, they correspond with that last woo-woo version of graveyard visits. Therefore they are a complete, epic fail.

Your turn, um. Go on, clearly tell me what you’ve seen in graveyards, and what you conclude from it, and how you think that ties in specifically with what I’ve said to you about truth claims in my last comment.

[um]

@ AR

Some one said ..you are an artist without art.

Maybe my way of expressing myself is my art, like a painter and a poet.

People digest their products all according their mental make up .. what can the poor artist do about it??
What I have to give, I gave.
If it is meaningless and valueless for you, so be it.

[Appreciative Reader]

Dear um, please don't be hurt with my words! You aren't making sense; and I cannot pretend, just out of my goodwill for you, that you're making sense.

I've been very clear in discussing the very points you raised, and in those exact terms that you chose to raise them. What's stopping you from clearly engaging with what I said? ...I don't get it, I really don't, what's stopping you from doing that!

...But it's fine, if my close probing is upsetting you, then let's just drop it. No issues, um, not a big deal at all. ...Cheers, old friend, until next time, then.

[um]

@ AR

What I write has meaning and value for me ..irrespective of others and I do not need to live from my products nor anybodies understanding or agreement..

The time of being hurt, has gone when I woke up in the cinema..

Metzinger like Al Gazali, in his days and people like Einstein, used the academical jargon to explain to their colleagues what they already knew ...I am not able to put things before you an an academical acceptable logic way ..but that doesnt 'make what I wrote not less meaning full and valuable

[Appreciative Reader]

"Metzinger like Al Gazali, in his days and people like Einstein, used the academical jargon to explain to their colleagues what they already knew"

Heh, I hate to keep keep correcting you, um; but I really don't know how to let zingers like this pass by unremarked, without making some attempt at setting them right. Forget Al Ghazali, he was just a philosopher; no doubt very bright for his time, but in this day and age he has limited, very limited, use. But coming to Einstein:

No, he most emphatically did NOT merely "use academical jargon to explain to (others) what he already knew". To think that is to completely misunderstand, at a fundamental level, what science is.

Einstein certainly did have inspirations, of course he did. But the methods of science were how he tested, and built on, and perfected his intuitions, and much else besides. Science isn't merely "jargon"; it is a method of discovery, is what it actually is. The methods of science are what enabled Einstein to find out what he did; and to test what he found out; which is what he presented to the world.

Sorry, um, your ideas about science seem completely misplaced.

...And if you will not engage with what is being said, then I don't see how you can possibly examine your beliefs and ideas. What I said to you a while back about truth claims in religion; that very clearly resolves the doubts you'd expressed here. And yet, inexplicably, you refuse to engage with it, I have no idea why.

...Anyhoo. Like I said, no big deal. If you don't want to do this, then of course we won't.

[77]

It s difficult even for an acknowledged psychic
they see a windmill
afterwards it was a coffee grinder

As I know now
this species is an experiment
I placed on X more on scientific grounds
of how the experiment could end ::

https://x.com/Ankhaton/status/18300407581305241751

777

[7]

Sorry
It ishttps://x.com/Ankhaton/status/1830040758130524175
7