Free Will, Free Speech, and Us.

a reply to: TheConstruKctionofLight

I think the best response to the imperfect world is through information/knowledge/community/craftsmanship and innovation when possible/needed.

You're on to something about making copies of valuable information too.

Thanks for the interesting discussion!

a reply to: zosimov
Thank you too

With modern technology we really need to look at how we go forward and partake in this thing called society.

I used to think one-sided about laws, societal structure, rules, regulations etc. I used to see it as a top heavy system. Where the "peasants" are often dictated to. That's obviously still true to an extent.

I mean we are born free but from that day everyone is trying to teach you and essentially program you to act in certain ways and to think in certain ways, even governments have power over how you'd raise a child, government control the education of many children. It's always a top heavy system we find ourselves in from birth to death.

Yet we have to coexist in harmony. Teaching a child to defecate anywhere isn't acceptable, teaching children extremist views in school isn't acceptable. My point being sometimes freewill and even free speech has to be seemingly controlled.

It's why over time I've been seeing the appeal of true anarchism at some point in our future.

Because our societies are becoming too big to effectively handle, it's becoming a joke how harmony is achieved in society. We cannot treat people how we did in the early days of the industrial revolution, we can't take the law into our own hands, isolating ourselves from society isn't exactly the solution either since we're supposed to live together... Just not like this.

We live in a society today where minorities have huge sway in public debate as if forced agreement is going to be the norm for the majority. We need to rethink society.

In the next 50 years a population of 250 people will be able to become self-sufficient whilst enjoying all of the modern benefits of society, ideally in this time frame all peoples will be free and independent enough to travel anywhere.

I'm probably rambling now but what I'm getting at is devolution of power, let individual societies decide what they want to do to live in harmony with each other, if you don't like that society feel free to move on. We instinctively want to live together, we instinctively don't rock the boat unless we're in distress of some sort. Yet we live in a world these days where some of us are rocking the boat just for the sake of it. We need more boats.

I see no reason why individuals can't get together and dictate their own existence. I've been at many a party where in debate you have one person disagreeing with the majority. It's good to debate and healthy to disagree but eventually someone has to decide this isn't the party for me and leave.

Nobody likes a party pooper right?

Well... These days we live in societies where someone is always disagreeable, often enough in adamant ways, they make groups and gain the power of change next thing you know society is being dictated to and a minor issue becomes a major one.

I dunno lol... Does any of that make sense?

a reply to: TheConstruKctionofLight

Just to correct the status of Italy

Thank you.
I didn't fact check every statement.
Time to edit has expired.

a reply to: RAY1990

It does make sense! I just think I am too tired to give a worthwhile response tonight. I'll try to get back to some of the ideas that struck me tomorrow.

Is there not more, to all: 'this', than words?
Can we not perceive thought: below, different, upstream from words, letters, and other such restrictions?

a reply to: Nothin

There is television.
I saw this movie back in about 1965.

Sullivan arrived at Keller's house on March 5, 1887, a day Keller would forever remember as my soul's birthday. Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug.[18] But soon she began imitating Sullivan’s hand gestures. “I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed,” Keller remembered. “I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation.”

Keller's breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water". Writing in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller recalled the moment. "I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!" Keller then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.
Helen Keller

One of coolest jobs I've ever had was reading books to blind college students. I even replaced the reflective tape on a cane once. That was way cool.

originally posted by: pthena
a reply to: Nothin

One of coolest jobs I've ever had was reading books to blind college students. I even replaced the reflective tape on a cane once. That was way cool.

I recorded college textbooks on tape for Disability Services also! One of my classmates recognized my voice as the narrator of his text after we chatted in class one day-- that was fun. It was a very cool job, you're right!

a reply to: zosimov

I recorded college textbooks on tape for Disability Services also!

Both of the college students that I read for were majoring in Social Sciences, so I got to read books like I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is the story of a sixteen-year-old who retreats from reality into the bondage of a lushly imagined but threatening kingdom, and her slow and painful journey back to sanity.

Chronicles the three-year battle of a mentally ill, but perceptive, teenage girl against a world of her own creation, emphasizing her relationship with the doctor who gave her the ammunition of self-understanding with which to help herself.

"I wrote this novel, which is a fictionalized autobiography, to give a picture of what being schizophrenic feels like and what can be accomplished with a trusting relationship between a gifted therapist and a willing patient. It is not a case history or study. I like to think it is a hymn to reality." - Joanne Greenberg
www.goodreads.com...

The scene I remember most is paraphrased "I grabbed on to the falling god, and we fell together."

I don't know if it was specifically stated in the book, but I think it was referring to an illustration in Milton's Paradise Lost

a reply to: Nothin

Is there not more, to all: 'this', than words?
Can we not perceive thought: below, different, upstream from words, letters, and other such restrictions?

Dreams:
Theory: Lucid dreams may not be recallable unless an attempt has been made to describe them in words (including thinking about them). They may still be lost somewhere along with memories, but not accessible.

On the other hand: see Eidetic memory

Lilienfeld et al. stated, "People with eidetic memory can supposedly hold a visual image in their mind with such clarity that they can describe it perfectly or almost perfectly ..., just as we can describe the details of a painting immediately in front of us with near perfect accuracy."
…
Eidetic memory is typically found only in young children, as it is virtually nonexistent in adults. Hudmon stated, "Children possess far more capacity for eidetic imagery than adults, suggesting that a developmental change (such as acquiring language skills) may disrupt the potential for eidetic imagery." Eidetic memory has been found in 2 to 10 percent of children aged 6 to 12. It has been hypothesized that language acquisition and verbal skills allow older children to think more abstractly and thus rely less on visual memory systems. Extensive research has failed to demonstrate consistent correlations between the presence of eidetic imagery and any cognitive, intellectual, neurological or emotional measure.

But then:

individuals identified as having a condition known as hyperthymesia are able to remember very intricate details of their own personal lives, but the ability seems not to extend to other, non-autobiographical information.[22][medical citation needed] They may have vivid recollections such as who they were with, what they were wearing, and how they were feeling on a specific date many years in the past. Patients under study, such as Jill Price, show brain scans that resemble those with obsessive–compulsive disorder.

So: Hyperthymesia

Individuals with hyperthymesia can recall much of their lives in near perfect detail, as well as public events that hold some personal significance to them. Those affected describe their memories as uncontrollable associations; when they encounter a date, they "see" a vivid depiction of that day in their heads.[3] Recollection occurs without hesitation or conscious effort.
…
Memories recalled by hyperthymestic individuals tend to be personal, autobiographical accounts of both significant and mundane events in their lives. This extensive and highly unusual memory does not derive from the use of mnemonic strategies; it is encoded involuntarily and retrieved automatically.[4] Despite perhaps being able to remember the day of the week on which a particular date fell, hyperthymestics are not calendrical calculators, like some people with savant syndrome. Rather, hyperthymestic recall tends to be constrained to a person's lifetime and is believed to be a subconscious process.
…
It has been proposed that the initial encoding of events by such people includes semantic processing, and therefore semantic cues are used in retrieval. Once cued, the memory is retrieved as episodic and follows a pattern similar to that of a spreading activation model. This is particularly evident in AJ's case. She describes how one memory triggers another, which in turn triggers another and how she is powerless to stop it: "It's like a split screen; I'll be talking to someone and seeing something else." This theory serves to explain why hyperthymestics have both a sense of 'knowing' (semantic memory) and 'remembering' (episodic memory) during recollection.

Others suspect that hyperthymesia may be a result of reviewing memories constantly to an obsessive-compulsive degree.[8] Other findings have shown that the tendencies to absorb new information and fantasize are personality traits that are higher in hyperthymestics than the rest of the population. These traits: absorption and fantasizing also correlated with one of the tests that measures superior autobiographical memory within the hyperthymestic sample.

Well that was a long trip to take just to get to the phrase "initial encoding of events by such people includes semantic processing, and therefore semantic cues are used in retrieval", but there you have it.

I was riding with my older sister when I was 14. She was driving. We drove past the Chiropractor's office behind the red brick hotel.

I said, "That's where you used to take accordion lessons."

She was like: "What? You were only three years old when I quit taking lessons!"

Had something to do with the pattern and coloring and mis-coloration of the red bricks, and the smell of the accordion when it first starts to open, after being closed for a long time.

If I didn't know the words brick or accordion would I have recalled that? I doubt it very much.

a reply to: pthena

Thanks for your thoughtful posts.
Read them a few days ago, but wasn't, and still am not, sure how to respond.

Am pointing at the understanding of water, that Helen Keller had, before she knew the word: "water".

Am pointing to the encoding in the brain, below the level of the semantic processing.
The ideas, thoughts, and concepts below the words.

From many years of being functionally bilingual: have experienced it differently.
Sometimes thoughts are expressing themselves in different languages here, so have looked, and seen a deeper level, where thought is appearing, that is beyond language and words, and then later, expressed via language, and words.

Your accordion lessons story was cool, thanks for sharing.
So what about a child living in another place, with a different language? Would they be unable to have an experience like yours, simply because the words 'accordion' and 'brick', are not the same in their language?

a reply to: Nothin

Am pointing to the encoding in the brain, below the level of the semantic processing.
The ideas, thoughts, and concepts below the words.

I wasn't ready to address that issue yet. It would actually present a counter argument ( antithesis ) to my thesis about the necessity of words.

So I made a new thesis: A human cannot be a full animist once he/she has a symbolic language.

The antithesis would be: That's nonsense, because oral traditional cultures can still be animists.

Synthesis: Narrative baby! Whether sequence of actual sensed things moving; a spoken story with movements and acts and an implied plot and meaning; or written symbols (pictographic or alphabetic) which serve as a mnemonic device for spoken symbols; narrative is key.

I accidently learned some Philosophy terminology:
Hegelian Dialectic:
"The formula, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, does not explain why the thesis requires an antithesis. However, the formula, abstract-negative-concrete, suggests a flaw, or perhaps an incompleteness, in any initial thesis—it is too abstract and lacks the negative of trial, error, and experience." - Wikipedia, Dialectic

Cartesian Dualism
"Dualism is closely associated with the thought of René Descartes (1641), which holds that the mind is a nonphysical—and therefore, non-spatial—substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence.[6] Hence, he was the first to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it exists today." - Wikipedia, Mind-body dualism.

Some important stuff about animism.
wikipedia: Animism
Basic definition:

Animism encompasses the beliefs that all material phenomena have agency, that there exists no hard and fast distinction between the spiritual and physical (or material) world and that soul or spirit or sentience exists not only in humans, but also in other animals, plants, rocks, geographic features such as mountains or rivers or other entities of the natural environment, including thunder, wind and shadows. Animism thus rejects Cartesian dualism. Animism may further attribute souls to abstract concepts such as words, true names or metaphors in mythology.

Animism is a modern word invented by Anthropologists to describe the world views of primitive (oral, pre-alphabetic) people.

The new animism
...
More recently post-modern anthropologists are increasingly engaging with the concept of animism. Modernism is characterized by a Cartesian subject-object dualism that divides the subjective from the objective, and culture from nature; in this view, Animism is the inverse of scientism, and hence inherently invalid. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, these anthropologists question these modernist assumptions, and theorize that all societies continue to "animate" the world around them, ... Rather, the instrumental reason characteristic of modernity is limited to our "professional subcultures," which allows us to treat the world as a detached mechanical object in a delimited sphere of activity. We, like animists, also continue to create personal relationships with elements of the so-called objective world, whether pets, cars or teddy-bears, who we recognize as subjects. As such, these entities are "approached as communicative subjects rather than the inert objects perceived by modernists." These approaches are careful to avoid the modernist assumptions that the environment consists dichotomously of a physical world distinct from humans, and from modernist conceptions of the person as composed dualistically as body and soul.

I'm going to avoid quoting the whole Wikipedia page and jump to something worth consideration:

Cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram articulates and elaborates an intensely ethical and ecological form of animism grounded in the phenomenology of sensory experience. In his books Becoming Animal and The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram suggests that material things are never entirely passive in our direct experience, holding rather that perceived things actively "solicit our attention" or "call our focus," coaxing the perceiving body into an ongoing participation with those things. In the absence of intervening technologies, sensory experience is inherently animistic, disclosing a material field that is animate and self-organizing from the get-go. Drawing upon contemporary cognitive and natural science, as well as upon the perspectival worldviews of diverse indigenous, oral cultures, Abram proposes a richly pluralist and story-based cosmology, in which matter is alive through and through. Such an ontology is in close accord, he suggests, with our spontaneous perceptual experience; it would draw us back to our senses and to the primacy of the sensuous terrain, enjoining a more respectful and ethical relation to the more-than-human community of animals, plants, soils, mountains, waters and weather-patterns that materially sustains us. In contrast to a long-standing tendency in the Western social sciences, which commonly provide rational explanations of animistic experience, Abram develops an animistic account of reason itself. He holds that civilized reason is sustained only by an intensely animistic participation between human beings and their own written signs. Indeed, as soon as we turn our gaze toward the alphabetic letters written on a page or a screen, these letters speak to us—we 'see what they say'—much as ancient trees and gushing streams and lichen-encrusted boulders once spoke to our oral ancestors. Hence reading is an intensely concentrated form of animism, one that effectively eclipses all of the other, older, more spontaneous forms of participation in which we once engaged. "To tell the story in this manner—to provide an animistic account of reason, rather than the other way around—is to imply that animism is the wider and more inclusive term, and that oral, mimetic modes of experience still underlie, and support, all our literate and technological modes of reflection. When reflection's rootedness in such bodily, participatory modes of experience is entirely unacknowledged or unconscious, reflective reason becomes dysfunctional, unintentionally destroying the corporeal, sensuous world that sustains it."

So what about a child living in another place, with a different language? Would they be unable to have an experience like yours, simply because the words 'accordion' and 'brick', are not the same in their language?

I think that seeing a thing, or even a picture of that thing, then learning the name in any spoken language, will bring memories of experiencing that thing. Like Helen remembering water.

Plus: different languages have different grammatic and syntactic constructions. If someone can tell a story in two languages (not fake like only using one syntax with plugging in two vocabulary sets) then it would be like seeing in stereoscope; metaphorically.

a reply to: zosimov

Well , What We All Say Usually Means What We Say , Sometimes.........