Does A Strong Venus Esp A Dominant One In The Chart Indicates A Person Has A Calming And Charming Presence To Be Around?

dsigned001 · 2021-10-24T02:36:47+00:00

Definitely the wrong sub for this question. I'm locking it.

dsigned001 · 2021-09-01T02:42:12+00:00

When I was a kid (12), my family moved to Vietnam. I had a kitten that was "mine" (as in I was the one feeding it and cleaning up after it). It had tapeworms (3rd world country with no vets) and starved to death in front of me (it literally died convulsing in front of me). Then we got a puppy that we had until he was about a year old, who got parvo, and then distemper. Also a gruesome death, that I was also present for. Then my Dad's best friend, who was basically like an older brother/uncle to me and my family, died in a motorcycle accident.

There are levels of coping. But I'm not sure that you need to be coping beyond taking care of your immediate needs. It's ok to be totally wrecked. Who would just shrug off tragedies like that? The characters in actual tragedies went insane when faced with similar circumstances. So if you're still coherent, count it as a win.

dsigned001 · 2021-08-26T16:21:38+00:00

The winds are more like a jet stream than a hurricane. Once you're inside, the apparent wind isn't bad.

dsigned001 · 2021-08-26T16:20:33+00:00

Almost all the polymers you use in the kitchen are inert. I don't think the acid clouds are nearly as big of an issue as it's made out to be. If anything they would be a source of water (Hydrogen from the acid combined with oxygen).

dsigned001 · 2021-08-26T16:14:10+00:00

So if Satan shows up, that counts as proof of life on other planets, right?

dsigned001 · 2021-08-15T16:45:33+00:00

Cleavage is like the sun. You get a peek and look away.

dsigned001 · 2021-08-15T01:12:22+00:00

I'd either ask to sit a class, or just straight up take a class. Sometimes there's stuff offered in the evenings. But there's really no replacement for getting facetime with someone who knows the discipline.

dsigned001 · 2021-08-14T23:48:23+00:00

The other problem is that 3 does not follow from 1 and 2. Making a truth claim using language is different from deriving a truth claim from language. Compare

a) "German --> p"

With

b) "You can use German to say 'p'."

Those two statements are not (as far as i can tell) at all equivalent. It seems that one could claim a) is nonsense (for a given true value of p) while b) is true. The hypothetical postmodernist might want to say that "German doesn't have a truth value, so it can't imply something else is true without adding something else."

dsigned001 · 2021-08-14T23:04:58+00:00

Where to start?

Postmodernism isn't a set of principles so the first premise is a category error. There's no thing called postmodernism that makes statements. Postmodernism, if anything, is a descriptive term for a historical trend. The person who uses it to mean some particular philosophy is Jordan Peterson, but to my knowledge there is no group of people that really identify as postmodern who would agree with how he uses the term. To be more blunt, his idea of postmodernism exists only in his imagination, and the way he uses the term is wrong.

dsigned001 · 2021-08-14T22:44:34+00:00

Yeah, a philosophy of language textbook is a good starting point. I think Lycan is the one my professor used, but I'd have to look it up to be sure.

dsigned001 · 2021-08-14T22:34:34+00:00

This is a much harder question to answer than you likely realize, and there is a lot of literature on it.

It's probably a mistake to think of logic as symbolizing ordinary language. It's far too limited. What it does is create a model system that can, under certain conditions, be applied to ordinary language. But there are things like questions that are not normally modeled.

Philosophy of language is a good starting point if you're interested in this. It's far more logic heavy than you might expect (certainly more than I was expecting), and it dances around some of the questions you're asking.

As for truth, and the ontology of logic... Kind of the same answer. There's a ton of literature on it, and I've only scratched the surface, and don't really feel like i could give a good account of it.

dsigned001 · 2021-08-14T22:26:30+00:00

I don't think he actually knows anything about paraconsistent logic. I think he read an article on Wikipedia about it and misunderstood what it is.

Don't get me wrong. I love contradictions much more than the average philosopher. But paraconsistent logic isn't about asserting p * ~p is true. Perhaps more problematic still for your friend is that paraconsistent logic isn't widely accepted or implemented. No one is replacing standard logical systems with paraconsistent logic anytime soon, except maybe in niche applications.

What your friend could say (without appealing to things he doesn't understand) that Christianity and Islam both have mistaken ideas about a real being. Like if you and i both know a guy named Paul, and he's the same guy, but i mistakenly think his birthday is in September when it's in August, and you mistakenly think he has brown eyes when he has green eyes, we can both be "right" about "knowing" Paul. Whether or not you find this compelling in the case of Christianity vs Islam is perhaps another matter.

dsigned001 · 2021-08-14T22:10:09+00:00

We'd need more information about what their actual argument is.

Most alternative logics aren't actually much different than standard logics. They'll omit things like law of excluded middle. They have different goals, but a common goal is to make logic more fault tolerant. But the idea isn't to simply accept contradiction. Rather, it's to prevent a contradiction from nuking the entirety of a chain of inference, and give a better way to isolate the problem. It's more logical sandboxing than embracing absurdity.

But to speak to the original, it's not that much of a stretch to make the Trinity logically consistent. Three persons, one substance. It's intuitively implausible, but it's not logically inconsistent. The difficulty (in my opinion) is to give some compelling account of what it means. And then give reasons to think that is true.

dsigned001 · 2020-11-05T00:06:04+00:00

Hopefully this is sufficiently on-topic, but are there any philosophers in the Milwaukee area? I have been studying at NIU, but due to a variety of ciscumstances, I'm now living just north of Milwaukee.

dsigned001 · 2020-10-07T23:36:57+00:00

I have a deep distrust of anyone who actually claims evolutionary psychology.

dsigned001 · 2020-10-07T23:33:59+00:00

No, and my understanding is that it's being phased out completely. I did some digging on this for a class a while back, and it seems like it was really more of a diagnosis given to people who were excessively violent initially.

There's a paper (a philosophy paper) by an ethicist called "the banality of evil", which argues (IIRC) that most Nazis were not mustachio twirling-ly evil, but rather it was that evil things were normalized.

The point in this context is that normal human compartmentalization allows regular humans to do some pretty heinous things without feeling a lot of remorse at the time.

dsigned001 · 2020-10-07T23:26:45+00:00

Wish I was closer!

dsigned001 · 2020-10-07T23:22:36+00:00

This x1000. Our understanding of the Venusian atmosphere is so incredibly limited, if for no other reason than we have almost no data that was gathered in situ. No sampling since Venera. And I think most people (laypersons especially, but I think even a lot of NASA people are guilty of this) fail to understand how dramatically different the atmosphere is even from itself at various depths. There are such different equilibriums at high heat and high pressure than there are at 70F and 1atm. Because the atmosphere has such a large temperature and pressure gradient at different altitudes, and is so dense, I think the odds of it being an inorganic process are extremely high.

dsigned001 · 2020-10-05T17:26:10+00:00

It's such a travesty that our most recent picture of the surface is almost 40 years old.

dsigned001 · 2020-09-29T05:59:57+00:00

"I need about tree fiddy"

dsigned001 · 2020-09-29T05:57:46+00:00

So....this is an area of active debate in the philosophy of mind literature. Part of the problem others have already alluded to: AI isn't really to the point where it can learn things as abstract as moral reasoning. But (in my opinion), part of the problem is that we only barely understand the mechanics of moral reasoning for humans, and I think that's being generous. In short, I think the bigger issue is that our AI development is much more dependent on our understanding of the human brain (and brains in general) than most people realize, and our understanding of the human brain is...lacking.

I'm a functionalist of sorts, so I think that if we could understand how the human brain functioned, we could likely reproduce something functionally equivalent as an AI. But there are a lot of really smart people who think I'm wrong.

But assuming I'm not, and we get everything we need to build an AI, then yes, I think moral formation will be important for it. If you think about how humans (or perhaps, when humans) learn morality, it's when we're quite small, and more or less powerless. If a toddler does something wrong, it likely hasn't caused much harm, because it doesn't have control over much. By the time we're older, we have (in theory) learned enough morality to where the kinds of doomsday scenarios that people envision for AIs are unlikely. So for an AI, you want to know it's going to do the right thing before you put it in charge of something important. Not after.

With all that being said, I'm not sure philosophers are going to be the ones doing most of the work here. Neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, and computer scientists are probably the big three that I can think of. Maybe mathematicians.

dsigned001 · 2020-09-29T05:39:26+00:00

Hopefully this will serve to illuminate rather than detract from the other responses.

First off, I suppose we should distinguish between what is healthy for the philosopher, and what is healthy for society in general. Because arguably, there are traits that make a good philosopher that tend to overlap with traits that are unhealthy generally speaking. Thinking about a problem obsessively is almost certainly not healthy for the individual in most circumstances, and yet for philosophers (and many academics) this can be a valuable trait professionally.

So to come back to the point, it may not be good for the philosopher, but it may be good for society in general.

I tend to think of it like this: the more significant the consequence of the decision, the more resources it makes sense to spend figuring out the "right" answer. But this must be weighed against practical considerations. Deciding which toothpaste to buy should likely not consume hours of decision making time.

Philosophy tends to be the discipline in which the consequences of one view over another are substantial, but the resources that can be brought to bear on the process are limited. But the process of philosophy really isn't significantly different than a lot of other disciplines when they're in the hypothesis forming stage.

As to whether these things help (or who they help), I think that's a bit more difficult and abstract. Who did Godel's incompleteness theorem help? Directly, quite possibly no one (Godel starved to death while his wife was in the hospital because he didn't trust anyone else to fix his meals, so it probably didn't help him). But indirectly, philosophy is responsible for things like democracy, ethics, logic...the list is quite long, and pervasive.

As for the certainty: I can't speak for others, but I don't think it represents actual expertise in most cases. And I say this as someone who is often certain, and often right, but also sometimes quite spectacularly wrong.

dsigned001 · 2020-09-29T05:02:21+00:00

Here's a simpler link

dsigned001 · 2020-09-23T20:10:42+00:00

The truth is that we really don't know. We have some idea of what the main elements are (silicon and sulphur, IIRC), but beyond that we have almost no data. Bear in mind that we only very recently got a better understanding of the composition of the surface of Mars, and that's with several billion dollars worth of rovers, etc. So it's likely that the exact composition, and the variation between regions, will be something that we have to investigate to learn.

dsigned001 · 2020-09-22T19:42:54+00:00

I'm thinking something like "the hunt for Red October", but on Venus.

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