Anthropogenic Negative Climate Change (ANCC)

[Brad Thomson]

Hi Brad:

You seem to argue that the real "biggest" crisis facing mankind is world over-population. This is throwing Nature off the normal course in which it would evolve.

Nature has shown re predator/predated species, it has ways of maintaining balance - usually through disease or predation. So Nature continues to be "sustainable" as it evolves. You also seem to agree that nuclear war is probably the second biggest danger to mankind.

So is it that you see Nature as, kind of instinctively, using "Climate Change Suicide" as one way of solving the over-population problem, and regaining its natural evolutionary path?

Bob A (T-S/P)

Thanks Bob,
The biggest crisis in my view is the total amount of pollution humans are causing, not overpopulation precisely. The planet could easily sustain the population numbers we have now, and more, if we all lived far more simply and produced less total pollution. It is the total pollution that is the problem, not the number of people causing it. That being said, the chances of we geniuses reducing our economy to a sufficient extent are, I think you will agree, about the same as the chances of you or I winning the world chess championship. It ain't gonna' happen. Thus, I see Nature as not instinctively but quite deliberately using the pandemic as THE way of solving over-pollution in order to stop "Climate Change Suicide" so that we CAN continue as a species, vastly reduced in numbers but living as well economically as we do now, though not risking over-pollution due to the vastly reduced numbers (at least until we re-populate over a long period of time). Nature wants/needs humanity to continue because we provide the philosophers that come to understand the Truth so that Nature comes to full self-knowledge. The "unfolding" (a good Hegelian term) cannot take place without us. I suppose that nuclear war may be the second biggest threat to mankind, but unless the bombs go off it is no threat at all. The over-pollution is already very well advanced and getting worse rather than better. Again, we will do nothing about it, hence the cull.

[Neil Frarey]

Agreed, Nature/existence itself is a becoming. But becoming can be understood in two senses. Either simple permanent random change, or permanent change directed by an evolutionary pattern that is implicit and in the nature or definition of Nature/existence itself, a logic. I contend the latter.

As with 'Time' so too is 'Evolution' ... artificial constructs. Trying to shoehorn Nature into constructs / formulas is VANITY at its finest.

Earth will continue to Grow and then die. It's called Life.

Parents with their newborn ... they wish for the child to Grow ... not Evolve ... but Grow. Entrepreneurs wish for their business to Grow ... not Evolve ... but Grow. Your savings portfolio you wish to Grow ... not Evolve ... but Grow.

Growth is all that matters.

[Brad Thomson]

As with 'Time' so too is 'Evolution' ... artificial constructs. Trying to shoehorn Nature into constructs / formulas is VANITY at its finest.

Earth will continue to Grow and then die. It's called Life.

Parents with their newborn ... they wish for the child to Grow ... not Evolve ... but Grow. Entrepreneurs wish for their business to Grow ... not Evolve ... but Grow. Your savings portfolio you wish to Grow ... not Evolve ... but Grow.

Growth is all that matters.

I am of the opinion that Time IS Substance, THE substance and the ONE substance. Nature, it seems to me, is an "artificial construct" of Time itself, Nature is the outpouring or unfolding of Time into particular manifestations. I agree that "growth" is all that matters, but growth in the sense of developing self-knowledge/awareness/understanding, not growth in the sense of increasing in physical size like people who may be drinking too much beer. :)

[Dilip Panjwani]

So Dliip Panjwani, right here on Chesstalk before our very eyes, with one simple sentence, has refuted Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel and many, many more of the greatest thinkers history has ever produced. I might also add that now solved is the most eternal philosophical question in both the Eastern and Western traditions. Truth has at long last arrived, and right here on Chesstalk. Yet Hugh Brodie only wants us to talk about chess?!

With all due respect to the philosophers in your quote, they were simply unfamiliar (in the 18th century or earlier) with the physiologic reality of our robust sensory systems in which information flows in one direction...from our surroundings to the sensory receptors to the sensory nerves to the sensory cortex, and thence to memories and ideas and creating unique electromagnetic patterns wherein our consciousness lies... The direction of flow is opposite to that postulated by them in their time...

[Bob Armstrong]

Hi Neil & Brad:

I instinctively recoil when I hear the word "growth".

World Capitalism's Goal is "exponential growth"............that is ............growth that is unsustainable.......it is the growth associated with pyramid selling. It is what has brought us to the precipice of Climate Change Suicide.

As well, growth can be unbalancing for evolution. Nature deals with it.

For example, in the Southern Georgian Bay region of Ontario, a while back, there were not a lot of coyotes (I think an illness had culled them). The groundhogs took advantage of the vacuum. The size of their litters increased, and we had groundhogs all over our pasture fields. Of course the problem is that horses, and cows, can break their ankles stepping in the den hole. Then coyotes started to make a comeback because there was so much food. Their litters increased. Now I hardly ever see a groundhog. And since the coyote has nn wolf preditor in our area, man has to cull the coyotes (Which will take down calves, and sometimes sick cows, or cows giving birth).

All this to say that "growth" is NOT a good absolute.........it is controlled growth that is best.

~ Bob A (T-S/P)

[Bob Armstrong]

Climate Change, Determinism & Free Will

Which statement is true and why? Any comments on either statement?

# 1 – From the time man surfaced on the planet, he has been forced to take action that denigrates the planet and atmosphere; it is pre-determined in his nature that this would occur. He had no choice.

OR

# 2 – Man, in his greed, and lack of respect for Nature, has caused the species to be on the brink of Climate Change Suicide. It did not have to be this way. Man has free-will, and he could have chosen positively, such that the climate was not lethally being changed.

~ Bob A (T-S/P)

[Brad Thomson]

Materialism does not necessarily deny free will, some materialist theories do and some do not. The question is whether consciousness is considered to be purely epiphenomenal, or whether it is thought to be able to choose to affect the material sequence which generated it in the first place. If consciousness is deemed to be epiphenomenal then it evaporates off of the end of the material sequence and can have no effect upon it. This means that even if there was no consciousness at all, the world would move along in precisely the same way that it does, but without awareness on the part of certain absolutely passive observers. Some materialist believe that consciousness can kick back so to speak, that it is not purely passive and that freedom does exist because the material sequence can and is effected by free choices of conscious beings. Thus, some materialists will say we have no choice with respect to climate change, some will say we do. I do not believe there are any idealists who would contend that we have no choice. In short, not all materialists are determinists, no idealists are.

I should add that Hegel and Marx, among others, believe that individuals are free and at the same time believe that history is determined to unfold or evolve according to a certain logic or pattern.

[Bob Armstrong]

Hi Brad:

Bit of trivia - re Hegel

In 1970-1, at U of T in Toronto, while doing a Masters in Philosophy, I took a course on Hegel from a world renowned expert, Emil Fackenheim (The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought - 1967). Here is his Wikipedia entry:

Emil Ludwig Fackenheim (22 June 1916 – 18 September 2003) was a Jewish philosopher and Reform rabbi.^[1]

Born in Halle, Germany, he was arrested by Nazis on the night of 9 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht. Briefly interned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (1938–1939), he escaped with his younger brother Wolfgang^[2] to Great Britain, where his parents later joined him. Emil's older brother Ernst-Alexander,^[2] who refused to leave Germany, was killed in the Holocaust.

Held by the British as an enemy alien after the outbreak of World War II, Fackenheim was sent to Canada in 1940, where he was interned at a remote internment camp near Sherbrooke, Quebec.^[3] He was freed afterward and served as the Interim Rabbi at Temple Anshe Shalom in Hamilton, Ontario, from 1943 to 1948.^[3] After this he enrolled in the graduate philosophy department of the University of Toronto and received a PhD from the University of Toronto with a dissertation on medieval Arabic philosophy (1945) and became Professor of Philosophy (1948–1984). He was among the original Editorial Advisors of the scholarly journal Dionysius. In 1971, he received an honorary doctorate from Sir George Williams University, which later became Concordia University.^[4]

Fackenheim researched the relationship of the Jews with God, believing that the Holocaust must be understood as an imperative requiring Jews to carry on Jewish existence and the survival of the State of Israel. He emigrated to Israel in 1984.

"He was always saying that continuing Jewish life and denying Hitler a posthumous victory was the 614th law," referring to the 613 mitzvot given to the Jews in the Torah.^[5]


Though I found Hegel's "Dialectic" interesting, and Karl Marx pragmatic use of it in the Communist Manifesto was superb, I felt Hegel, as some kind of Idealist, was wrong.

I had to do a major paper on Hegel. Not agreeing with Hegel, I did a paper on my own view of "History Unfolding".

I got a comment from Emil when I got my paper back with my grade: "Next time, would you mind reading some Hegel!"

But he was a very open professor...........nevertheless......he gave me an "A"!

More Trivia (Which I think many do not know)

Wikipedia

Karl Marx (German) started out as a philosophy student, as an expert in Hegel (He also studied law). He studied at the Berlin University, the Bonn University. and the Jena University (PhD in Philosophy, 1841) in Germany.

Marx was considering an academic career, but this path was barred by the government's growing opposition to classical liberalism and the Young Hegelians.^[58] Marx was a member. Like Marx, the Young Hegelians were critical of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, but adopted his dialectical method to criticise established society, politics and religion from a left-wing perspective.

So Marx moved to Cologne in 1842, where he became a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung (Rhineland News), expressing his early views on socialism and his developing interest in economics

~ Bob A (T-S/P)

[Brad Thomson]

Thanks Bob,
Hegel is very difficult to understand, and I will confess that his Phenomenology of Spirit is utterly incomprehensible to me, while his Encyclopedia is almost as baffling. Parts of his Science of Logic are easy, other parts are impossible. His Philosophy of Right is a little more accessible. But reading his various series' of lectures is much easier, more understandable, and quite illuminating. I have read his entire Lectures on the Philosophy of History, much of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and some of his Lectures on Aesthetics, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and Lectures on Logic. If I live long enough I hope to complete all of these works and then start over again.

[Bob Gillanders]

Don't look up. I love this movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPe_...StephenColbert

[Dilip Panjwani]

Materialism does not necessarily deny free will, some materialist theories do and some do not. The question is whether consciousness is considered to be purely epiphenomenal, or whether it is thought to be able to choose to affect the material sequence which generated it in the first place. If consciousness is deemed to be epiphenomenal then it evaporates off of the end of the material sequence and can have no effect upon it. This means that even if there was no consciousness at all, the world would move along in precisely the same way that it does, but without awareness on the part of certain absolutely passive observers. Some materialist believe that consciousness can kick back so to speak, that it is not purely passive and that freedom does exist because the material sequence can and is effected by free choices of conscious beings. Thus, some materialists will say we have no choice with respect to climate change, some will say we do. I do not believe there are any idealists who would contend that we have no choice. In short, not all materialists are determinists, no idealists are.

I should add that Hegel and Marx, among others, believe that individuals are free and at the same time believe that history is determined to unfold or evolve according to a certain logic or pattern.

Quite succinct explanation, Brad. I should add that our lifetime scientist McFadden's theory of electromagnetic consciousness has not been accepted by the scientific community because he tries to postulate that consciousness governs free will, even when there is not an iota of evidence pointing in that direction (despite a lot of effort to find it), and neuroscientists specializing in consciousness in general believe that consciousness is epiphenomenal...

[Bob Armstrong]

Epiphenomenalism - Wikipedia

It is a position on the mind–body problem which holds that physical and biochemical events within the human body (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions, for example) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition). According to this view, subjective mental events are completely dependent for their existence on corresponding physical and biochemical events within the human body yet themselves have no causal efficacy on physical events. The appearance that subjective mental states (such as intentions) influence physical events is merely an illusion. For instance, fear seems to make the heart beat faster, but according to epiphenomenalism the biochemical secretions of the brain and nervous system (such as adrenaline)—not the experience of fear—is what raises the heartbeat.^[1] Because mental events are a kind of overflow that cannot cause anything physical, yet have non-physical properties, epiphenomenalism is viewed as a form of property dualism.

~ Bob A (T-S/P)

[Bob Armstrong]

Bob G:

Review of "Don't Look Up": https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/25/enter...iew/index.html

~ Bob A (T-S/P)

[Peter McKillop]

....
The appearance that subjective mental states (such as intentions) influence physical events is merely an illusion. For instance, fear seems to make the heart beat faster, but according to epiphenomenalism the biochemical secretions of the brain and nervous system (such as adrenaline)—not the experience of fear—is what raises the heartbeat.[SUP].....

Why do biochemical secretions suddenly raise the heart rate?

[Dilip Panjwani]

Why do biochemical secretions suddenly raise the heart rate?

As part of the body's 'fight or flight' response,,,