European politics

[fightinfrenchman]

There are just so many dumb posts lmao

[princeofcarthage]

There are just so many dumb posts lmao

Numbers could be significantly lower if you stopped posting tbh.

[fightinfrenchman]

There are just so many dumb posts lmao

Numbers could be significantly lower if you stopped posting tbh.

Not really

[chris1089]

Would be good if you contributed to the discussion rather than simply insulting people or making shitposts @fightinfrenchman .

[fightinfrenchman]

Would be good if you contributed to the discussion rather than simply insulting people or making shitposts @fightinfrenchman .

Would be good if you banned people for being anti-semitic tbh

[Dolan]

In all seriousness i think you should reflect on your world view at some point. You seem to believe in a degree of determinism by factors such as culture, religion and societal evnironment that essentially nullifies human agency.

I don't think these factors nullify human agency. That was one of the issues that were part of the debate on determinism and free will from another thread, which I put on ice until I get a clearer view on whether a proof of free will is possible in a world determined by physical laws. Some people argue that it's not and everything is just an uncontrollable flow of causes and effects, of which you're just an unaware executant. I doubt that's the case, I think (physical) determinism should be understood more like a foundation, rather than a complete and thorough controller of every world event, including human actions. In every human action we could see a multitude of influences rooted in determinist factors (culture, physical environment, physical self), but those influences don't simply and fully determine the content of someone's thoughts. There's some degree of back-and-forth deliberation in human thought, which keeps potential outcomes in suspense. Even if someone is "determined" by their culture, they might still grow to criticise their own culture. Determinists will argue that's the case because a culture contains the seeds of internal discord in its own matrix, so Socrates had no choice in whether to become Athens' staunchest critic or not. But if that's the case, these contradictory outcomes point to physical laws working through agents that contradict each other. How could physical laws determine factors (influencing human actions and thoughts) which work in contradiction with each other?

Physicists would reply ez: just as the individual trajectories of particles in a state of Brownian motion are not individually determined by physical laws, one by one, but rather statistically, by determining the environment in which they bump into each other (for example, the system containing the particles could be in the process of establishing thermal equilibrium with an external system) -- so can individual actions of humans collide, while still determined by placing a certain configuration of genetics and developmental history in an environment that prompts that person to react in a certain way.

Anyway, I'm not going to close this argument on determinism with a conclusion, because it's a work in progress. I brought it up because it's an example of how determinists could tell you that everything someone thinks and does is just the result of previous factors, in which nothing else could intervene to give you free will. To argue otherwise would imply that there are uncaused (or self-caused) causes, which can intervene in a world determined by physical laws and guide some outcomes in a way which cannot be explained only through physical forces acting through that agent.

But coming back to the subject of the discussion, there are clear patterns in how culture can determine someone's likelihood to act in a certain way, by shaping their mentality. Someone who grew up in an Anglophone country shaped by a Protestant environment is likely to believe both in individualism and charity. While people born in Eastern Europe are likely to believe less in both, since family structure here is more important and showing kindness towards random strangers is considered a sign of weakness, of making yourself liable to someone exploiting your kindness. It's not a question of whether or not you have "the universal trait of empathy" (as every brainlet who reads science news or wikipedia believes, because "scientists said so" so it must be universally and transhistorically true), it's a question of how and what factors modulate how you express it, towards what kind of beneficiaries: your clan, your family, your people, your gang, or "the universal family" of humanity (according to the UN, the Guardian readership and Enlightenment thinkers). Culture can definitely shape that.

if you are consequent with that logic, your own views and especially that believe in cultural determinism is also only determined by your culture and experiences.

It's possible and quite likely, at least to some extent. While I haven't closed that argument on determinism because I'm waiting for physical laws to tell me what to think about determinism, I do think that there might be some kind of gradation in terms of how much someone's actions are completely guided by simple determinism. People are not equal in terms of how much they are able to get outside of their own culture and operate outside the comfort zone of their own cultural bubble. There definitely are individuals who are better at learning foreign languages and demonstrate more cultural flexibility and adaptability, which makes them capable of coming very close to passing for a member of another culture. Those who achieve this at their first try are super-rare, though, it usually happens gradually, through multiple generations making gradual progress towards adopting the new culture in which they were transplanted. And they might still not end up becoming an indistinguishable member of that culture, but rather creating their own blend of it.

But then, it's also possible that culture is not just ideaware, just cognitive software you could just install and uninstall, quickly switching from one culture to another. It might be rooted in some genetic determinants too. We already know from anthropology that what later became a tribe or an ethnic group was initially a culture, ie people banding around common practices, interbreeding and eventually developing genetic kinship. That's how the expression "Slavic genetics" should be understood, because otherwise it makes no sense, since Slavic refers to just language. The so-called Yamnaya people who came to Europe from the Pontic steppes (starting from around 5000 yrs ago), creating this layer of common ancestry among lots of Europeans (Slavs, Germanics, Scandinavians), were called that way because they had a common culture (of burying their dead in pit graves with animal offerings, etc). But today anthropologists talk about Yamnaya genetics, despite them initially being defined by a culture.

How could a culture acquire genetic underpinnings? There are some hints at this from recent and current research. Some recent research (link) suggests that fricative sounds appeared as a result of humans changing the way they produced and stored food: as we relied more on fermented and soft food, humans preserved their overlapping bite, that infants have, into adult age. Which made it possible for languages to add sounds like f and v. Not all languages have these sounds, especially not those tribes that are still living as hunter gatherers. So a change in technology led to a biological adaptation which eventually was reflected in a cultural change. There's another interesting piece of research (link) which points to the possibility that languages which create semantic differentiations based on rising/lowering vocal tone (such as Chinese) tend to appear in certain humid climates.
Here's another line of argumentation for how genetic adaptations could lead to cultural changes: it seems European populations have developed genetic adaptations which made them eat a particular combination of foods in particular proportions. For example Southern Europeans have a diet that is largely plant-based, while more Nordic populations, like the Inuit of Greenland, have a biochemistry that is better able to process lots of meat fat. Link to study which provides genetic evidence in support: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/34/6/1307/3062804

Idk, apart from the logical reasons against that view (though i concede there are also good reasons for it) i just wouldn't like to think about myself as just a mindless slave of my own environment.

Nobody does, but it's a challenge raised by the current paradigm of thought which says that nothing that is not an effect of a physical law can take place.
Anyway, you're right, I should reflect more on my world view to get a better idea on all this, when I get the time.

[princeofcarthage]

@Dolan that's what I like, now let's get that 10000 word thesis going

[fightinfrenchman]

In all seriousness i think you should reflect on your world view at some point. You seem to believe in a degree of determinism by factors such as culture, religion and societal evnironment that essentially nullifies human agency.

I don't think these factors nullify human agency. That was one of the issues that were part of the debate on determinism and free will from another thread, which I put on ice until I get a clearer view on whether a proof of free will is possible in a world determined by physical laws. Some people argue that it's not and everything is just an uncontrollable flow of causes and effects, of which you're just an unaware executant. I doubt that's the case, I think (physical) determinism should be understood more like a foundation, rather than a complete and thorough controller of every world event, including human actions. In every human action we could see a multitude of influences rooted in determinist factors (culture, physical environment, physical self), but those influences don't simply and fully determine the content of someone's thoughts. There's some degree of back-and-forth deliberation in human thought, which keeps potential outcomes in suspense. Even if someone is "determined" by their culture, they might still grow to criticise their own culture. Determinists will argue that's the case because a culture contains the seeds of internal discord in its own matrix, so Socrates had no choice in whether to become Athens' staunchest critic or not. But if that's the case, these contradictory outcomes point to physical laws working through agents that contradict each other. How could physical laws determine factors (influencing human actions and thoughts) which work in contradiction with each other?

Physicists would reply ez: just as the individual trajectories of particles in a state of Brownian motion are not individually determined by physical laws, one by one, but rather statistically, by determining the environment in which they bump into each other (for example, the system containing the particles could be in the process of establishing thermal equilibrium with an external system) -- so can individual actions of humans collide, while still determined by placing a certain configuration of genetics and developmental history in an environment that prompts that person to react in a certain way.

Anyway, I'm not going to close this argument on determinism with a conclusion, because it's a work in progress. I brought it up because it's an example of how determinists could tell you that everything someone thinks and does is just the result of previous factors, in which nothing else could intervene to give you free will. To argue otherwise would imply that there are uncaused (or self-caused) causes, which can intervene in a world determined by physical laws and guide some outcomes in a way which cannot be explained only through physical forces acting through that agent.

But coming back to the subject of the discussion, there are clear patterns in how culture can determine someone's likelihood to act in a certain way, by shaping their mentality. Someone who grew up in an Anglophone country shaped by a Protestant environment is likely to believe both in individualism and charity. While people born in Eastern Europe are likely to believe less in both, since family structure here is more important and showing kindness towards random strangers is considered a sign of weakness, of making yourself liable to someone exploiting your kindness. It's not a question of whether or not you have "the universal trait of empathy" (as every brainlet who reads science news or wikipedia believes, because "scientists said so" so it must be universally and transhistorically true), it's a question of how and what factors modulate how you express it, towards what kind of beneficiaries: your clan, your family, your people, your gang, or "the universal family" of humanity (according to the UN, the Guardian readership and Enlightenment thinkers). Culture can definitely shape that.

if you are consequent with that logic, your own views and especially that believe in cultural determinism is also only determined by your culture and experiences.

It's possible and quite likely, at least to some extent. While I haven't closed that argument on determinism because I'm waiting for physical laws to tell me what to think about determinism, I do think that there might be some kind of gradation in terms of how much someone's actions are completely guided by simple determinism. People are not equal in terms of how much they are able to get outside of their own culture and operate outside the comfort zone of their own cultural bubble. There definitely are individuals who are better at learning foreign languages and demonstrate more cultural flexibility and adaptability, which makes them capable of coming very close to passing for a member of another culture. Those who achieve this at their first try are super-rare, though, it usually happens gradually, through multiple generations making gradual progress towards adopting the new culture in which they were transplanted. And they might still not end up becoming an indistinguishable member of that culture, but rather creating their own blend of it.

But then, it's also possible that culture is not just ideaware, just cognitive software you could just install and uninstall, quickly switching from one culture to another. It might be rooted in some genetic determinants too. We already know from anthropology that what later became a tribe or an ethnic group was initially a culture, ie people banding around common practices, interbreeding and eventually developing genetic kinship. That's how the expression "Slavic genetics" should be understood, because otherwise it makes no sense, since Slavic refers to just language. The so-called Yamnaya people who came to Europe from the Pontic steppes (starting from around 5000 yrs ago), creating this layer of common ancestry among lots of Europeans (Slavs, Germanics, Scandinavians), were called that way because they had a common culture (of burying their dead in pit graves with animal offerings, etc). But today anthropologists talk about Yamnaya genetics, despite them initially being defined by a culture.

How could a culture acquire genetic underpinnings? There are some hints at this from recent and current research. Some recent research (link) suggests that fricative sounds appeared as a result of humans changing the way they produced and stored food: as we relied more on fermented and soft food, humans preserved their overlapping bite, that infants have, into adult age. Which made it possible for languages to add sounds like f and v. Not all languages have these sounds, especially not those tribes that are still living as hunter gatherers. So a change in technology led to a biological adaptation which eventually was reflected in a cultural change. There's another interesting piece of research (link) which points to the possibility that languages which create semantic differentiations based on rising/lowering vocal tone (such as Chinese) tend to appear in certain humid climates.
Here's another line of argumentation for how genetic adaptations could lead to cultural changes: it seems European populations have developed genetic adaptations which made them eat a particular combination of foods in particular proportions. For example Southern Europeans have a diet that is largely plant-based, while more Nordic populations, like the Inuit of Greenland, have a biochemistry that is better able to process lots of meat fat. Link to study which provides genetic evidence in support: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/34/6/1307/3062804

Idk, apart from the logical reasons against that view (though i concede there are also good reasons for it) i just wouldn't like to think about myself as just a mindless slave of my own environment.

Nobody does, but it's a challenge raised by the current paradigm of thought which says that nothing that is not an effect of a physical law can take place.
Anyway, you're right, I should reflect more on my world view to get a better idea on all this, when I get the time.

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

[Dolan]

I don't, it's just physical laws doing their thing

[Goodspeed]

That doesn't make you any less you

[fightinfrenchman]

I don't, it's just physical laws doing their thing

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

[Dolan]

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

Idk, dude.

maybe scientist @Metis can explain

[scarm]

Thank you for your post Dolan. While i just don't have the time or energy to really commit to the argument to the degree that would be needed, i still really appreciate that you bothered to map your thoughts on the topic.

[Dolan]

Yw. I write them anyway, to make sure I have a pasta for later use, just in case.

[fightinfrenchman]

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

Idk, dude.

maybe scientist @Metis can explain

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

[Goodspeed]

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

Idk, dude.

maybe scientist @Metis can explain

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

Just stop tbh, it's not having the intended effect

[fightinfrenchman]

Show hidden quotes

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

Idk, dude.

maybe scientist @Metis can explain

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

Just stop tbh, it's not having the intended effect

I'm just hoping he answers tbh

[Goodspeed]

He obviously won't

[Dolan]

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

Idk, dude.
maybe scientist @Metis can explain

Why do you hate Jewish people so much

ure_gonna_need_a_bigger_b8.webm

[Horsemen]

There are just so many dumb posts lmao

why don't you endow us with one of your bigbrain posts?

[fightinfrenchman]

This guy seems normal

[Dolan]

He won, tho. And the UK didn't just roll over and die just because they left the EU, as so many predicted. They're doing mostly fine.

[duckzilla]

Depends on your point of view. To me, the UK shows signs of falling apart slowly in multiple dimensions. It's easy to just say something "does mostly fine" without going into any detail.

[fightinfrenchman]

He won, tho. And the UK didn't just roll over and die just because they left the EU, as so many predicted. They're doing mostly fine.

This doesn't make him not a weirdo. Also why do you hate Jewish people?

[Dolan]

Also why do you hate Jewish people?

They brought communism to Romania and make awful architecture.