TheVat

Well, one hopes. Though when Putin orders Russian troops to go in and "maintain the peace," my universal translator shows that as "I am invading Ukraine now!" i.e. eye whites due imminently.

While I can agree that reincarnation is a doctrine that focuses on human life in this world, and posits no realm beyond this world, it does suggest a connection between individual lives that is supernatural. In Buddhism, there is dharma, the cosmic law which sets up a moral duty to make the best of one's life, to grow spiritually and in harmony with ethical principles of respect for all consciousness and all living things. To assert the dharma, to assert a moral order to the universe, is to advance a supernatural belief -- something is keeping track of one's actions that has more than just the human five senses and cognition in play. Something is guiding the process of transmigration. In eastern religions, this is not construed as a personal god, but as something, a transcendent mechanism perhaps that we cannot access with science or reason. So, while there is no afterlife or spirit plane, there is some sort of spiritual infrastructure that lies beyond atoms interacting. Because transmigration cannot happen in a purely physicalist account of the universe, can it?

It's war, and Biden should stop with the half-assed bit about sanctioning the Donbas breakaways. Sanction the damned Russians. As in right fecking now. Did Joe not listen to Vladdy's hour-long speech/rant today? What part of "Ukraine is a state we created and a part of Russia" did you not follow, Joe? Kind of a blue moon day when I find myself agreeing with Lindsey Graham! Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) Tweeted: His decision should immediately be met with forceful sanctions to destroy the ruble and crush the Russian oil and gas sector. https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1495853103219986434?s=20&t=UUYxSfnS7NHUl8ZiLXh2uQ

Once I was a passenger in a car at night and noticed an orange glowing ovoid object zooming along on a parallel path to the car keeping pace with us. Looking around the interior of the car, I realized two things. One, i had been dozing and was not fully alert. Two, the oval corresponded to a light on the instrument panel which was reflected off the side window at just the angle to create the illusion. Tired brains often stumble at processing sensory data. That said, I plan to drive near Marfa the next time I'm in West Texas and try to see the famed mystery lights. (Marfa also has a cool art museum) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights

Links don't work. Perhaps they have amnesia, too?

Well, you need the liver to live. Hence the name. (joke borrowed from Hugh Laurie) Seriously, I don't close any doors on the paranormal, either. Or holistic phenomena that science, in its more reductive approaches, may not have looked at. One need not be religious to speculate that all consciousness may be more connected, more going on at functional levels on the global scale, than is apparent in our mundane affairs. Biologists like to wander off into the weedy fringes on this -- Lovelock, Margulis, Sheldrake -- and why shouldn't they? As long as the speculation doesn't itself become a dogma and as long as it yields new paths of genuine exploration. Sheldrake, in particular, seems to have a door open to the reincarnation concept, with patterns of thought repeating themselves from one life to another.

From the Washington Post A State Department spokesperson said Friday’s evacuation and apparent bombing in Donetsk represented the kind of staged operation that officials have said could precede a Russian attack. “This type of false-flag operation is exactly what Secretary Blinken highlighted in his remarks” at the U.N., the spokesperson said in a statement, which was circulated on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Biden administration. “Announcements like these are further attempts to obscure through lies and disinformation that Russia is the aggressor in this conflict.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/18/ukraine-russia-donetsk-evacuations/

Well, I do sort of wonder about the internal consistency of the various transmigration doctrines. If the memories die with the brain, then how could children have memories (like in Ian Stevenson's research) of a past life in another body which died? This is part of the incoherence, for me. Not that one could not come up with complex paranormal mechanisms for that, but most believers just assume there's the occasional leakage from... where? The aether? The Akashic Records? This has come up in my own life, because I am not materialistic and people sometimes call me an "old soul." I push back on this, pointing out obvious childhood influences that explain those aspects of personality better. To a western eye, a soul without memories would just be undifferentiated consciousness.

If "you" are a totally different person, then in what sense is there reincarnation?? This is what I find incoherent about the concept. The procrastination comment was meant to address this logical incoherence, sorry if that was not clear. And I didn't mean delaying in the sense of delaying one's plans to visit Greece or master cribbage, I meant delaying pursuit of spiritual growth.

It's hard to rule out a "Wag the Dog" scenario. Maybe. He could tell Russia, "Look over here! I'm rescuing our ethnic Russian brothers and sisters who are under the oppressor's thumb in Donbass!". Or maybe he's after the mineral wealth. It's always worth asking what we aren't seeing, where Russia is concerned.

MOSCOW, Feb 18 (Reuters) - A Russian-backed separatist leader in eastern Ukraine announced the evacuation of his breakaway region's residents to southeast Russia on Friday after an increase in shelling. Announcing the move on social media, Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, said Russia had agreed to provide accommodation for people leaving and that women, children and the elderly should be prioritised. "As of today, Feb. 18, a mass centralised evacuation of the population to the Russian Federation has been organised," Pushilin said. "Women, children and the elderly are to be evacuated first," he said. Washington and its allies have raised fears that the upsurge in violence in the region could form part of a Russian pretext to invade Ukraine. Tensions are already high over a Russian military buildup to the north, east and south of Ukraine. Russia, which denies planning to attack, voiced alarm earlier on Friday over a sharp increase in shelling in the region known as the Donbass. Several hundred thousand people plan to leave the Donetsk People's Republic to Russia's region of Rostov, the Interfax news agency cited a source in the self-declared republic's parliament as saying. Nahhh, there's not gonna be any war. Just your ordinary routine evacuation of civilians before someone does a little light bombing the shit out of the place. The population of 4.2 million people? Uh huh.

From what Blinken was saying at the UN, the intel he was reporting, it sounds like the Kremlin is busily constructing pretexts. And lying their pants off. I found the Russian pearl-clutching over ours and NATO's defensive buildup especially ludicrous. The whole thing is insane. You'd think Vlad and his oligarch buddies would at least have some self-interest in not screwing up the global economy and their access to offshore banking, property assets, etc.

https://www.sbpdiscovery.org/news/beaker-blog/surprising-science-not-all-our-cells-have-same-dna Genomic mosaicism in neurons may be a factor.

The "hundred bucks at Home Depot" scene in the Coen brothers film, "Burn After Reading" (the last minute is NSFW) https://youtu.be/ZrzEDyS9Ddw (Cannot be embedded, due to age restriction)

Unless one rejects the notion that the truth of propositions can consist in other propositions, which is the core of coherence theory. Scientific realism holds that some coherence may reside in a web of beliefs about the world but that the truth condition of propositions must always rest on objective features of the world. IOW, theoretic interpretations can be coherent or not, insofar as they fit into a web of other propositions, but their truth can only be determined empirically. For example, saying that both Saturn and the Sun orbited a stationary Earth once seemed coherent and consistent with other propositions, but ultimately the proposition collapsed as empirical techniques were greatly improved.

Liar Liar, with Jim Carrey, back when he was funny. The answer to the OP question is "depends." As you note, there may be a moral imperative to lie to oppressors and murderers bent on harm. Or to those bent on self-harm.

If you are acquainted with the concept of aneuploidy, it will help you with at least one of those questions. Bonne chance avec tes etudes!

It's the doctrine of karma, not reincarnation by itself, that calls people to focus on their actions in this life. At least that's my understanding of how transmigration is not simply a random shunt into another life. OTOH - and here is where survey data would be helpful - it seems to me that reincarnation could also lead some to procrastinate. So, hey, I didn't resolve my problems in this life. No problem, I'll take care of them in the next one. I've got eons to work them out! What would be useful would be a large survey where you compared reincarnationists with heaven-ists on various metrics of success, life satisfaction, relationship happiness, feelings about death, etc. Though there would be a big bundle of other confounding cultural and socioeconomic factors to deal with - you might just get a big data mess.

RIP PJO. A conservative who happened to be truly funny. And whose principled views would not let him support Trump in 2016. I will miss him. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/15/pj-o-rourke-dies-writer-humorist

Yes, a lot of the positives that veganism (which surely represents a range of perspectives, as most Isms do) offers the future is just the capacity to spark conversations and reflections on multiple issues: carbon footprint (and arable acres per person), human health from a nutritional angle, the ethics of using animals, the question of whether or not we NEED to use animals given the techniques of modern food science, and so on. A lot of veganism seems to settle around two major loci: human effect on the planet as a whole, and human effect on the lives of animals as sentient creatures. IOW, either the focus is on planetary ecological engineering and control of greenhouse gases, and the other is the deeper ethical concerns with animal rights and what suffering is imposed. They both address the ethics of how personal choices ripple outward through the world. I know there are now enough vegans in the world that when I go to the egg section of the supermarket, there are now cartons that contain a faux egg mix composed of plant proteins. This means there are enough people who are either outright vegans or think veganism is cool enough to try some vegan options, to merit production and distribution of the stuff. Personally, my digestion always does well with more fiber, so the plant-based options are usually a plus for me (if palatable).

As someone with a bit of Classics education back there, I feel it's worth mentioning that arete is a Greek term for excellence and the aspiration to fulfill one's highest potential as a person. It is NEVER "safe to assume..." Also, lest your assumptions go ranging wildly again, please know that I am not actually a vat, or a brain in a vat. I do tap into vats, now and then.

I am reminded of the words of famous New York senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts." Sadly, I don't have 17 meme placards to buttress that with.

Bit of a confusion here. Comorbidities are not the cause of death. Death certificates may show a chain of events, but the cause of death is that which sets in motion a cascade of organ failures that otherwise would not have happened. A patient with treatable T2 diabetes and COPD and some CV disease may be more susceptible to certain organ failures, but those are not the COD. Pretty much every study I've seen finds COVID-19, when listed as the COD, as the primary cause and not something that just happens to be hanging out in the throat while the patient had pneumonia followed by respiratory failure followed by heart failure. I think Reuters recently had a useful fact check on this. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-comorbidities-coviddeaths-idUSL1N2TU22X

As it happens, we watched a movie last night we had missed when it was released in late 2015, Eye in the Sky, with Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman and a fine ensemble struggling with the ethics and legalities of making a drone strike in Nairobi on a house full of terrorists who are getting ready to do two suicide bombings. Without going into all the complexities (one of the most cerebral political thrillers I've seen), I'll just say it comes down to a choice: strike immediately and kill the bomb-vested ones before they leave (this is the only way to intercept them), while also likely killing a young girl selling bread right outside, or wait until the girl has sold her bread and leaves. If they wait, it is certain the bombers leave and dozens, maybe hundreds, will die in a shopping mall or marketplace. (a surveillance "beetle" is inside the house, so they can see the bombers strapping on vests and wiring up) A similar problem to this thread's - the proposal is to do something morally wrong to do something right, to save many lives. The generals are all pretty much okay with it. The government ministers are more resistant (not all for the best of reasons). The drone pilot, seeing the little girl, is horrified and puts up resistance and throws some procedural wrenches into the machinery. The film is almost a "must see" for an ethics thread like this one.

There is some evidence LUCA would have been an extremophile, found around hydrothermal vents. https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/looking-for-luca-the-last-universal-common-ancestor/