domain:parrhesia.co
fmaa
9hr ago
Which includes this quote from you:
My religion, at least, doesn't require me to reject the readily-observable reality of free will, which is the base of my argument here. You can directly observe yourself making choices moment-to-moment. Materialism says that can't actually be what's really happening, and makes specific predictions as to why and how to prove it. Those predictions have been falsified every time they've been tested. Materialism ignores the falsifications and simply pretends such control exists, as you yourself demonstrate above.
Which flatly denies the existence of compatibilism. Neither materialism nor determinism say you aren't really making choices. Determinism does make the currently untestable claim that, given the exact same starting state and exact same inputs, the choice-making algorithms in your mind would produce the exact same outputs. Materialism claims that this choice-making is fully contained in physical processes in the brain, which is currently imperfectly testable, but has some good evidence for it.
Just so. You are assuming materialism/non-determinism. You are treating materialism/non-determinism as an axiom. I do not object to you doing so, because this is exactly what axioms are for. Nor do I claim that I can prove your axioms wrong, because that is not how axioms work. At best, I might be able to present evidence that does not fit nicely into your axioms, giving you the choice of discarding the evidence or the axiom, but even this is difficult to accomplish and boils down to an apparently-free choice on your part.
No, I assume materialism and determinism for my model of the world (Yeah, quantum uncertainty means the universe can't be perfectly predicted. There is currently no reason whatsoever to believe this has any effect on the brain or cognition.) But crucially my ability to converse does not in any way rely on these assumptions, let alone their opposite, which is your original claim that I objected to.
My objection to Determinism is not "I don't feel like I'm a machine". My objection is strictly empirical: you cannot in fact manipulate me like a machine, and that sort of manipulation is the central characteristic of machines.
The first quote sounds a lot more like "I don't feel like I'm a machine" to me. Otherwise, this comes back to your absolutist stance where the weather isn't materialistic because we can't fully control it and lobotomies aren't physically controlling your personality because they only produce a specific, not arbitrary, change to it.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
9hr ago
A further complication is the difference between brand names and generic names. I generally know the names of my prescription medications by the generic name, because that's what the pharmacy prints on the labels. However, every doctor I've ever seen refers to drugs by the brand name (which is usually easier to say).
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9hr ago
Mind reading is weakly possible. Elon Musk is doing it right now, amongst others.
I've seen Musk and others doing I/O. I/O is not read/write. The difference is one involves with a widget and your mind that you could otherwise do with your hand and your mind, and the other involves directly reading or changing your mind. When Musk has a working, rigorously accurate lie detector, let me know.
It's just that it's very difficult to extract useful information against someone's will.
If this is true, as opposed to it being strictly impossible, could you give me some examples of mental information being extracted deterministically from a human mind?
The chip die for the human mind is encased in a woman's uterus. The BIOS is encased in the human genome. It's just that the production process is insanely complicated.
A chip die is a tool we use to make a chip the way we want it. A BIOS is a tool we use to make basic adjustments to how a computer functions. We cannot make human minds the way we want them, with a uterus or by any other known means. We cannot make basic adjustments to how they operate, through the genome or by any other known means. It is not that the production process is insanely complicated; that would imply we could have some reasonable certainty that if we buckle down and work at it we should crack it in short order. But in fact, we do not know how to make significant positive changes to the human brain, and we have no idea if significant positive changes to the human mind are possible even in principle. Von Neumann seems to have had a superior human brain. He does not seem to have had a superior human mind; all evidence I've seen indicates that he was quite human in all the usual ways. I do not believe that a civilization of Von Neumanns would achieve Utopia, nor even lack criminals; I do not think you should believe this either.
The resurrection of Christ is a totally different kind of matter.
Why bring it up then? My point was that confident claims about things you believe will happen in the future are not evidence.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
9hr ago
schmutz
German nouns must be capitalized. They do not exist in un-capitalized form.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
9hr ago
That's tautological, surely? I'm asking why is it female gendered.
At some point, no, it just reinforces itself.
If you want the historical root cause: Because women have always been predisposed towards care work on acount of remaining at home with the young, sick and elderly while men went out and abroad.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10hr ago
Well, let's try again, then.
I recall a notorious manipulation of brain matter that had been popular just a century ago and demonstrably controlled behaviour. Destructively so, yes, but, again, not any more a debunkment than medieval amputations were of modern surgery.
In a very real and very important sense, standing on top of a large box does not help you get to the moon.
In this same sense, smashing a computer with a baseball bat does not demonstrate that you can code. It does not demonstrate that you can almost code, or that you are incrementing toward the ability to code. Medieval amputations had at least some appreciable chance of increased survival chances of the patient, and so are an example of very crude, very early surgery. Lobotomies are mind destruction, not mind control.
As for mind reading, developments appear to be underway on that front.
That is I/O, not read/write. It's pretty neat, and I'm all for it, but it is not actually what we are talking about here. I can type with my fingers, this would let me type with my brain, but the typing is the same. Some examples of actual read/write technology:
- a working love potion.
- a reliable lie detector.
- granular memory editing or legible playback.
When I look at the pattern of history it appears exactly the opposite of what you said
Coincidentally I have not studied them.
...It is probably pretty hard to see a historical pattern in a part of history you have not and will not look at.
This appears to me to be a deflection/smear akin to "John Money who coined the term 'gender' was an icky pedo" if taken uncharitably, and if taken charitably it seems that you are arguing with dead wrong Materialists whereas I expect you to be arguing with me.
Okay, let's try a different way then.
As I understand it, you believe that science is advancing toward deterministic interaction with the human mind. Not the brain, the mind. Not Ted Chiang's microscopic gold-foil windmills, but the air currents winding between them:
Here too I observed a latticework of wires, but they did not bear leaves suspended in position; instead the leaves flipped back and forth almost too rapidly to see. Indeed, almost the entire engine appeared to be in motion, consisting more of lattice than of air capillaries, and I wondered how air could reach all the gold leaves in a coherent manner. For many hours I scrutinized the leaves, until I realized that they themselves were playing the role of capillaries; the leaves formed temporary conduits and valves that existed just long enough to redirect air at other leaves in turn, and then disappeared as a result. This was an engine undergoing continuous transformation, indeed modifying itself as part of its operation. The lattice was not so much a machine as it was a page on which the machine was written, and on which the machine itself ceaselessly wrote.
My consciousness could be said to be encoded in the position of these tiny leaves, but it would be more accurate to say that it was encoded in the ever-shifting pattern of air driving these leaves. Watching the oscillations of these flakes of gold, I saw that air does not, as we had always assumed, simply provide power to the engine that realizes our thoughts. Air is in fact the very medium of our thoughts. All that we are is a pattern of air flow. My memories were inscribed, not as grooves on foil or even the position of switches, but as persistent currents of argon.
The above is a strict improvement on the standard brain-as-a-computer/mind-as-a-program metaphor, in my view.
I am claiming that:
- Deterministic technological interaction with the human mind is isomorphic to mind reading or mind control.
- There is no evidence of working mind reading/control technology currently existing.
- There is no evidence of meaningful progress toward working mind control tech in the near future. I note that you and others disagree on this point, but I think my claim is well-founded.
- We do not know if such technology is possible even in principle. There are solid theoretical reasons to believe that it would be fundamentally or practically intractable, even under strict materialist assumptions..
- If such technology were possible, we have zero information about how far we are from it, whether ten or a thousand or a million years.
And here's the part I've been trying to get across to you above:
- There is more than a century's history of people claiming to be scientists, claiming further to have developed mind control technology, having their claims taken seriously by society at large, only to turn out to be complete frauds.
- This history demonstrates that we, collectively, are really bad at identifying fraudulent claims of mind control technology. The apparent reasons for this are illuminating to a number of interesting questions, but it is enough here to note the evident tendency.
- Inability to identify fraudulent claims of mind control technology has repeatedly led to woeful disasters.
- The above problems are not limited to mind control tech, they manifest in many other areas of tech as well, often with dire results. This is a serious problem with our entire paradigm, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
Therefore:
- I evaluate all claims of mind control technology based on strict empiricism. If you want me to believe mind control technology is possible, I want to see a rigorous demonstration of actual mind control. Until then, I think it is prudent to assume that all such claims are fraudulent.
Pointing to the march of actual technology does not answer my objection. I am pointing to the march of fake technology being treated as though it was real.
...And all of this is secondary to the point I've been trying to make through all these discussions, which is that axioms and empirical facts are different things, and that people commonly mistake or conflate the two. A lot of people believe Determinism, and think they believe it because it is empirically proven. In fact, there is zero empirical proof or even direct empirical support for Determinism. These people are believing it axiomatically, but do not recognize it as an axiom. All beliefs are chosen. Not all beliefs are chosen directly. Losing sight of how a belief was chosen is the easiest way to conclude that beliefs arrive in some other way than choice.
cjet79
10hr ago
I had the opposite reaction medication names are the fucking worst.
If you want me to remember the name of a medication name it something that makes sense like "blood pressure fixer" not something that looks like a latin vomited up a few different flower names. If there is more than one blood pressure fixer pill then start adding numbers or company names after the initial part of the name.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
10hr ago
Jones is the most overrated great fighter. He would have gotten his ass beat had he fought further, though heavyweights are probably just as bad as women's divisions.
I'm surprised to meet another fellow here who's into mma. There's a new card this week. Topuria, Payton Talbett and Joshua Van are amazing, violent, smart young prospects.
Tom Aspinall is the best heavyweight I've seen in a while. He has the potential to not lose for a decade straight like fedor.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
10hr ago
I agree on inter-society competition favoring cultures that can actually reproduce, with a small caveat that if your low-fertility society can siphon off kids from high-fertility societies fast enough AND assimilate them properly, then it can persist even without breeding the next generation on its own. But that's a theoretical construct that the west at best imagines itself to be like.
But I'd also like to point out that
- A nitpick: Sex is no longer equal to fertility nowadays, given contraceptives exist, although I suppose a thorough-enough nullification of bodily autonomy can remedy this.
- More substantially: Women traditionally aren't just a possibly-fertile hole, they also need to provide semi-skilled labor around the house, and need to have decent social skills and personality to boot. A society in which women are available for sex and possibly child-bearing but fail at all the tasks and interactions that follow is one with marriages so miserable that men will voluntarily refuse to marry.
Reducing marriage to the privision of sex alone may not be entirely off the mark, but it ignores a large part of what makes it important.
emotional abuse
Maybe the term gets "abused", so to speak, but "emotional abuse" seems like a perfectly reasonable way to characterise a pattern in which e.g. one partner in a romantic relationship routinely insults the other, calls them names, accuses them of infidelity for no good reason, belittles them, lies to them etc.
FtttG
10hr ago
people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia
Well, I can't imagine any way that could possibly be abused.
they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs
In fairness, I don't remember ever personally encountering any trans women who didn't fall into one of these categories or the other. I'm sure there must be a handful, but based on my own personal experience it wouldn't be unreasonable to round it off to these two categories (increasingly heavily weighted towards the latter).
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
10hr ago
A way around this is to
go to a different range.
phailyoor
11hr ago
I'm on board only if the government pays gives me a gun and ammo to practice with.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11hr ago
· Edited 11hr ago
I think the reality of the situation is that we still do not understand, outside of some special basic cases, in the slightest how genes correspond to phenotypes, beyond a sort of general sense that should make it clear to us that we do not even have the vocabulary and abstractions to describe such an understanding if it were handed down to us by divine inspiration. I'd expect the simplest nontrivial gene-IQ relationships to look something like "the presence of sequence A slightly reduces the frequency sequence B is transcribed into proteins in neurons when they contain between x and y concentration of transcripts of sequence C, so in individuals whose genetic makeup causes the concentration to converge to that band in their frontal lobe, they get slightly thicker myelin sheaths in that part of their brain, which might make you more smart except if it also happens in the temporal lobe in which case you just turn out schizo". Do we have analysis techniques that would pick this sort of thing up? My impression is that expecting our current ones to do so is comparable to trying to debug slowdowns in complex distributed systems by big-data search for correlations between system performance and the frequency (possibly joint) of individual words in source code.
To introduce a juicier culture war angle, the confusion about the discrepancy, i.e. the expectation that techniques like GWAS would pick up the heritability we expect from twin studies, seems to be motivated by the usual prior that surely the top-of-the-line techniques that the community of experts in a given area are excited about must at least be somewhat good (see also expectation that architects have good taste in architecture, artists have good taste in art, or social justice researchers can correctly identify and redress injustice in society). If you expect geneticists to not be meaningfully competent at genetics in absolute terms, then "geneticists could not find the mechanism of heritability that we are fairly certain exists" is an unsurprising outcome.
phailyoor
11hr ago
The thing is that this is not a constitutional challenge, but instead an attempt to expunge his record. Possibly importantly, there are other effects of that besides just the ability to buy a gun. My understanding is that there is no entitlement for the record to be expunged, and it will be at the discretion of the state through their statutory procedure.
Though, it may be possible that making this challenge is necessary before raising a second amendment challenge. Since there is a statutory way that he might be able to get his record expunged, then it would make an as-applied second amendment challenge much weaker. The courts would likely find that the challenge is not ripe as there are other statutory remedies. I'm not sure about this though and possibly going for a second amendment challenge right away could have been the right legal move. Going for a facial challenge is also much harder, as the state can easily show a compelling interest in keeping guns away from the actually mentally ill, and that the law is reasonably tailored to this goal.
After losing this expungement case, the next step is probably to go for a second amendment challenge in federal court. Since his ability to buy a gun has been totally taken away, the burden of proof would then be on the state to affirmatively prove that he's an actual threat. Giving guns to forgetful elderly people might not be ideal but it's their right. Not sure how much of a nut this guy is otherwise, but if he really is then possibly the state could win.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11hr ago
Shame sure can enforce anti-social norms but the problem then is the norms, not the shaming. Every society does shaming in one way or another.
For instance, consider the complex built up in Britain that it was racist to look too closely into Pakistani grooming gangs or consider what exactly was going on with these naked, drunk 12-13 year old girl 'prostitutes' spending all this time with much older men, despite an otherwise powerful feminist apparatus. Shame works both ways. It can support cover-ups and abuse just as it can produce clean, cities full of orderly and considerate people.
Easy paths are all well and good but sometimes one has to do things that are hard, that's where shame comes in. 'Hard' can be doing very good or very bad deeds.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
11hr ago
· Edited 11hr ago
Yeah, the feeling is almost like I'm being shocked, it tickles in an uncomfortable way. I don't know enough about fabrics to say what actually triggers it.
I used to be very sensitive to noise. When I first rode on an airplane as a little kid, my mom had to buy some of these earplanes which were made to equalize pressure but also work well to reduce noise. This was back when turboprop planes were still in use at some regional airports in the US.
Well, still am I guess, but it's a lot better. I have to cover my ears during fireworks shows. Which is probably a good thing -- even fireworks explosions sometimes get loud enough that it could damage your hearing.
It's also true that I have a penchant for repetitive fidgeting. I have a box of fidget toys I keep on my desk.
I don't know that autism was ever really suspected, but my mom did have several books on her bookshelf whose titles rounded off to "What To Do If Your Child Is A Weirdo" and my social development was somewhat stunted. As far as I know, I don't have any relatives with either suspected or diagnosed autism. I do have first cousins with OCD, and OCD-like traits would probably explain my excessive concern for contamination and orderliness.
I don't know that I ever met diagnostic criteria for autism, although some people in my life have occasionally suggested it. But it is definitely true that I share some traits in common with high-functioning autism.
The National Instant Criminal Background Check Systems (NICS) is a 90s-era system that (almost) all buyers of firearms have to undergo every time they buy (almost) any firearm. Despite its name, it checks not just criminal history, but also every other category under the 1968 GCA that disqualifies a person from owning (almost any) firearm, where the disqualifying incident has been reported to the FBI. While most people notice this only when buying a firearm, those who get a DQ result from NICS are on notice that they can not legally own (almost) any firearms, no matter what conditions they received them.
One lesser-known disqualification is that of those who are 'adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution', which is the prong T.B. in this New Jersey case failed. However, the exact edges of those definitions are fuzzy. Most jurisdictions require some level of adversarial hearing or multiple doctors reviewing the commitment, but neither rule is part of the statute and neither have bright-line across-the-US caselaw.
While the Department of Veteran's Affairs had long held the ability to report 'mental defectives' since the 1993 establishment of NICS, and Clinton made some acts on this road, the Obama administration held that the Department of Veterans Affairs could use existing records to determine what veterans were 'mental defectives' and should do so automatically and categorically. To do so, they relied on determinations of what veterans had a fiduciary appointed to help manage their financial affairs, a process that had very low standards of evidence, a presumption of incompetence against the veteran, no due process rights to representation, did not require any qualifications or training for the administrative staff making the determination -- and, of course, did not give adequate preliminary notice that the act would strip away any Second Amendment rights. 95%+ of all "adjudicated as a mental defective" submissions to NICS from federal agencies were coming from the VA in 2013 and 2014. This ended up including hundreds of thousands of submissions.
((Continuing on a certain theme, the Obama administration based this policy's authorization on the bipartisan NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007.))
Most critically, veterans could and often did receive or even actively request fiduciaries solely to assist with financial affairs, not because they were dangerous or actually incompetent, such as if they wanted their spouse to have easier access to their records or VA fund. This could mean dementia or severe suicidal ideation, but because the VA was also getting eaten by paperwork in the same time period, this also could just be a matter of who in the family had the time or the patience to deal with the bullshit or, again, who could balance a checkbook.
Ostensibly, the policy was meant to reduce veteran suicide. To be charitable to the point of foolishness, I’m sure the proponents were absolutely sure that they were reducing firearms suicides (or lost guns) by making them less available to some vets. But given the near-complete disinterest in whether these disarmed vets were particularly likely to commit suicide, that’s about the best you can get, and then we’re back to the federal government treated arbitrary restrictions on a constitutional right as an unalloyed good, and these people targeted because they’d be less able to challenge it.
The Obama administration later proposed a federal regulation applying the same sort of system to Social Security and was expected to hit at least 75,000 people; this was blocked under the CRA in 2017. Some appropriations riders in 2024 and 2025 blocked the VA from using funds to submit records to NICS except where a finding of dangerousness or a court order was involved, though the last rider I'm aware of expired in March.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12hr ago
Well we can be pretty sure genetics is the substance behind heredity. I see no reason to give up on mechanistic models when good progress has been made. It's just difficult. Certainly not helped by the amount of fear and politics involved. Gene-editing is functionally illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui
Reading the above wikipedia article is soul-destroying given the context of what we now know about other genetic bioresearch in China in the late 2010s.
To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.
Just because the train is late, it doesn't follow that it will never come or that trains don't work at all. There is a lot of trackwork and bad weather plus the conductor has been derailing it!
Small reminder that the marital debt worked both ways; men also gave consent to women about having sex when they married, because now being one flesh the wife's body belongs to the husband and the husband's body belongs to the wife. And there were cases of women complaining that their husbands were not having sex with them (sometimes men are incapable, or not in the mood either, imagine!).
Well, yes; the husband is also supposed to screw the wife on a regular basis, and is in breach of his marital duties if he doesn't. But, for obvious reasons, this is a much less common problem than the opposite; the man bites dog to the dog bites man.
Besides, forcing an unwilling partner to let you fuck them can be no fun too, see the complaints from guys about "she just lies there and lets me do all the work, and waits for it to be over".
Now, in this, I actually agree that the husbands are being unreasonable, like a boss who demands that you smile at the costumers and ask how their day is going. Bad enough that the job has to be done; being forced to pretend to enjoy it is just adding insult to injury.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
12hr ago
I'm getting pretty okay results for a noob.
I bought one of these cleaning goo/gel ball things and it's been great for pulling cruft out of crevices.
Today I wondered why I don't try Windex with some microfiber cloths for the windows (inside and outside) and that went reasonably well. It streaks a bit but I think I can figure it out.
I have vacuum attachments in the mail that should help me clean the last 1% of little bits of schmutz from the interior I couldn't get out otherwise.
I haven't tried doing the wheels or wheel wells yet but I'm close.
I think I enjoy it. Might freak out the next time the kids track sand or leaves in the car. But maybe not because I'll have the kit standing by at home to clean it out in 15 seconds? We'll see!
What is a pizza delivery certified parking lot mechanic?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12hr ago
The pretense is in ignoring compatibilism.
I am neither ignoring nor even rejecting compatibilism. Compatibilism is an axiom, not an empirical claim. I object to compatibilism only when people claim to have demonstrated it empirically, because I am pretty sure they have not in fact done that.
My objection to Determinism is not "I don't feel like I'm a machine". My objection is strictly empirical: you cannot in fact manipulate me like a machine, and that sort of manipulation is the central characteristic of machines.
I am communicating with you right now, and from my perspective no part of this communication is based on assuming non-determinism.
Just so. You are assuming materialism/non-determinism. You are treating materialism/non-determinism as an axiom. I do not object to you doing so, because this is exactly what axioms are for. Nor do I claim that I can prove your axioms wrong, because that is not how axioms work. At best, I might be able to present evidence that does not fit nicely into your axioms, giving you the choice of discarding the evidence or the axiom, but even this is difficult to accomplish and boils down to an apparently-free choice on your part.
Other people do use materialism/non-determinism as an axiom, and then claim that it is not an axiom but an empirical fact. I have been arguing at some length and for some time that axioms and material facts are different things, and that confusing them leads to further confusion and often to outright disaster.
And same as the last time we had this conversation, I genuinely do not care what other people did under the label of capital m Materialism before I was born.
...Got a link to the previous version for context? In any case, to the extent that this is true, then you and I have no dispute. But I am interested in what other people did and are still doing under the label of Capital M Materialism, because I think their arguments are wrong, and I can demonstrate that those arguments have been enormously influential and have shaped our world for the worse on a vast scale.
I am not claiming you are part of a Movement, and am pretty sure I never have. I am claiming there is a very clear Movement, and a lot of people, including a lot of very prominent people, are part of it, and that one of the basic characteristics of this movement is conflating axiomatic arguments with empirical arguments, the better to pass their prejudices and fantasies off as scientific fact. I am not claiming that Materialism as an axiom can be disproved. I am claiming that Materialism as an empirical fact has at least two glaring holes, and that people who claim materialism is an empirical fact have a long history of lying.
If you tell me that you reason from the assumption that all phenomena are part of a chain of unbroken cause and effect emerging solely from the physical laws founding reality, that is fair enough. If you tell me that we can say, as an empirical matter, that we can observe the cases of all effects, well, no, we cannot in fact do that. If you tell me that things we cannot observe or interact in any way nonetheless exist and are "Materialistic", well, no, that is not what that word means.
OliveTapenade
12hr ago
Without getting too biographical, I work in a Christian field with a heavily Chinese population, and I find there's something very clarifying in the way people born and raised in non-Christian cultures receive the gospel. It forces you to think a lot about culture, nationality, Christianity, and the interactions between them all. Nowhere does the gospel obliterate or destroy the base culture - instead, I prefer to think of it in similar terms to C. S. Lewis, where the gospel refines and enhances whatever praiseworthy, God-given elements exist in the base.
In Mere Christianity he uses metaphors of light and salt for the way that the gospel enhances individual personalities:
Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them all and they would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible. Is it not quite possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the same way (i.e., all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the light will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are. Or again, suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to taste and he experiences a particular strong, sharp taste. You then tell him that in your country people use salt in all their cookery. Might he not reply "In that case I suppose all your dishes taste exactly the same: because the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so strong that it will kill the taste of everything else." But you and I know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually brings it out. They do not show their real taste till you have added the salt. (Of course, as I warned you, this is not really a very good illustration, because you can, after all, kill the other tastes by putting in too much salt, whereas you cannot kill the taste of a human personality by putting in too much Christ. I am doing the best I can.)
And then in That Hideous Strength he applies something like this to nations. He has the idea that every nation or culture has what he calls a 'haunting', the hint of its redeemed self, and these hauntings are naturally all different. The only one he names is Britain's, which he calls 'Logres', but he goes on:
“You’re right, Sir,” he said with a smile. “I was forgetting what you have warned me always to remember. This haunting is no peculiarity of ours. Every people has its own haunter. There’s no special privilege for England — no nonsense about a chosen nation. We speak about Logres because it is our haunting, the one we know about.”
“But this,” said MacPhee, “seems a very round-about way of saying that there’s good and bad men everywhere.”
“It’s not a way of saying that at all,” answered Dimble. “You see, MacPhee, if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardised — some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course, there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two Saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China — why, then it will be spring.
Now we might quibble the specific details, or go back and forth about what the real essence of Britain or France or China is, but I wouldn't want to get bogged down on that. Probably Lewis and his characters are struggling to express something very rich and complicated. But I have found this idea helpful in the past.
And in that light I interpret people like Inazo Nitobe, or Yuan Zhiming, however clumsily or even incompetently, as trying to articulate the divine haunting of Japan or of China, and in that way find not only themselves, but also their entire peoples in God's plan of salvation.
(And it should probably be noted that the latter quit his ministry and asked forgiveness after a rape accusation, so I'm including moral as well as intellectual incompetence.)
In Revelation 21:24-26, we are told, of the New Jerusalem, that "the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it", and that "people will bring into it the glory and honour of the nations". I'd like to believe that every nation has its own particular glory, its own particular honour, and that as part of the world's salvation, all of these will be brought to the altar before God.
Yes, I suppose it's possible that it's to do with the level of testosterone, and maybe higher-T men are more aggressive, and lower-T people more, for lack of a better term, intellectual or interested in abstracts.
I have no idea whether that's true, though. I obviously don't know my own level of testosterone or how that compares to other men. I would hazard that personality has to do with way more than just a single hormone, though, and while testosterone does make one more aggressive, the behavioural consequences of that seem like they would vary widely with everything else that goes into making up one's personality.
I could just as easily suggest that this forum might select for more testosterone, because I'd guess that it's unusual for people to actively seek out argument. People who post on the Motte are probably positively selected for enjoying conflict.
Ultimately I just really don't know. It would be interesting to have statistical data on the hormone profiles of Motters, but that data is inaccessible to us. I suppose I will file it away as something that would be mildly interesting, but which we won't know. Oh, well. It is an ever-growing file.
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