I really don't care what her "brain" "wants." Your brain is you. If it feels like a separate entity that you need to speak about in the third person, something is very wrong. Maybe you think it's humorous. But you're talking about withholding information from us. You're admitting that you know things that would hurt Biden's campaign, and you won't share it with the voters. You just wish you didn't know.
This is destructive of democracy. There must be a flow of information to the voters.
Paul goes on to argue that the Biden campaign should stress substantive policy differences between Trump and Biden. That's what I've been saying too. But you can't simply hide the candidate and forefront the party's policy agenda as if the man is nothing at all. You can't beat something with nothing.
If this becomes a personality contest — as hideous and inconceivable as that may sound to steadfast Trump loathers — Biden may well lose.
ADDED: Pamela Paul exhibits the problem that Ricky Gervais mocks Karl Pilkington about:
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54 comments:
Your man Biden loses a race of policy, too…
No one ever goes on to list these “substantive policy differences” which lead to clear cut victory.
What are they?
Outside of “women’s health” Biden is losing to Trump on just about every issue.
This is destructive of democracy. There must be a flow of information to the voters.
Democracy DIES in Darkness!
it's not a warning.. It's a Pledge
We're well into our "we have to destroy Our Democracy to save it" phase.
I read somewhere the argument that the actual Democrat candidate is Harris. The odds that Biden would live four more years as POTUS, with its stresses, are long. The GOP should pass him by and focus on her. Run against Kamala.
In the sentence "I am warming myself before the fire", the word "myself " could be replaced by "my body" without spoiling the sense; but the pronoun "I" could not be replaced by "my body" without making non- sense. Similarly the sentence "Cremate me after I am gone" says nothing self-annihilating, since the "me" and the "I" are being used in different senses. So sometimes we can, and sometimes we cannot, paraphrase the first personal pronoun by "my body". There are even some cases where I can talk about a part of my body, but cannot use "I" or "me" for it. If my hair were scorched in a fire, I could say "I was not scorched; only my hair was", though I could never say "I was not scorched; only my face and hands were". A part of the body which is insensitive and cannot be moved at will is mine, but it is not part of me. Conversely, mechanical auxiliaries to the body, such as motor-cars and walking-sticks, can be spoken of with "I" and "me; as in "I collided with the pillar-box", which means the same thing as "the car which I was driving (or which I owned and was having driven for me in my presence) collided with the pillar-box". Let us now consider some contexts in which "I" and "me" can certainly not be replaced by "my body" or "my leg". If I say "I am annoyed that I was cut in the collision", while I might accept the substitution of "my leg was cut" for "I was cut", I should not allow "I am annoyed" to be reconstructed in any such way. It would be similarly absurd to speak of "my head remembering", "my brain doing long division", or "my body battling with fatigue". Perhaps it is because of the absurdity of such collocations that so many people have felt driven to describe a person as an association between a body and a non-body.
Ryle, The Concept of Mind, p.169
"Biden may well lose." As he ought to, whether this is a personality contest or about policy, Biden holds the weak hand.
On a Sunday morning around the turn of the millennium the TV is on CNN and there’s this Elsa Clench fashion and style program playing but I’m not watching it. Suddenly my brain is forcing me to pay attention and I can’t figure it out…then I do. The random model at the YSL prêt-à-porter show is a girlfriend from grade school I haven’t seen in 15 years. My brain recognized her before I did…
This awful woman has it backwards. Her brain wants her to pay attention to what shit Biden is but SHE wants to deny and ‘delete everything’…
"This is destructive of democracy. There must be a flow of information to the voters."
Why? This is what American democracy is, and has been for a long time. Examples are too obvious: the point of the collusion hoax was to manufacture "information," and the point of the laptop letter to suppress it.
"Paul goes on to argue that the Biden campaign should stress substantive policy differences between Trump and Biden. That's what I've been saying too."
So, what is the Biden policy on the border, besides letting anyone in for any reason? What is the rationale?
"But you can't simply hide the candidate and forefront the party's policy agenda as if the man is nothing at all. You can't beat something with nothing."
True, the man is relevant, and Biden's decline may be too rapid for Dems to handle--but they can go pretty far in hiding the candidate. They did it in 2020. Not-Trump was enough, and probably will be this time. If all else fails, they can yell abortion. Which is next to nothing at the federal level, but the kind of nothing many nice voters will embrace eagerly.
@gilbar
Perfect comment!
If it feels like a separate entity that you need to speak about in the third person, something is very wrong.
This seems to be a very common stance currently, not always stated explicitly but often implied. It is essentially the root of the trans disturbance, the idea that your identity is not physically and mentally cohesive. It also seems to be a part of the more general therapy culture where your problems are blamed on your brain thinking uncontrollable thoughts.
" Get some...sour cream and onion chips, with some dip, man. Some beef jerkey, some peanut butter. Get some Hagen-Dagz ice-cream bars. A whole lotta of chocolate. Gotta have chocolate, man. Some popcorn, pink popcorn. GRAHAM CRACKERS!!! Graham crackers with the marshmallows. Little marshmallows with little chocolate bars and we'll make some s'mores man. Celery, grape jelly, Captain Crunch with the little crunch berries, pizzas, we need two big pizzas, man, everything on 'em, water, a whole lotta water and.......Funyuns."
Half Baked is a 1998 film that is a cult classic and a touchstone for many in the marijuana community, who feel that its humor, silliness, and wisdom were long overdue. It has helped bring the stoner film back into popularity.
Directed by Tamra Davis. Written by Dave Chappelle and Neal Brennan.
Wikipedia
I just don't understand how a truthful person can really mean "in all its unbridled terror" when referring to a second Trump term. I know it's becoming a cliche' to point out that during his first term there was low inflation combined with high employment, low interest rates, no new wars. He interacted with the press almost too much and because people who departed his administration blabbed a lot, there was quite a bit of transparency. He packed up and left when it was Inauguration Day for Biden. Ha, that last point is when the "terror" began for this country.
If every time you have a meeting with someone and come away feeling that you must be crazy because nothing they said made sense to you, consider the possibility that it isn't you, it is the other person who is not of sound mind. I suggest Pamela Paul consider this idea and apply it to her situation with Biden.
Working with dementia sufferers can be frustrating, but she needs to realize the man has declining mental faculties and is what he is, and she should behave accordingly towards him.
Pamela Paul is trying to steal Rebecca De Mornay's part in "The Love of Two Brains," starring Clive Warren.
Karl is right. So was that "bicameral mind" guy, we have part of the brain where consciousness resides, which evolved sometime In the past few million, maybe last million years, and we have a part of the brain that started its evolution hundreds of millions of years ago, lets arbitrarily say with the appearance of the first mammals. We call it the "subconscious" because it can't actually talk to us, except in dreams or through creating emotions we can sense,, and we can only sort of infer what it wants. It has senses we don't have access too, it can "smell" pheromones, it is fully aware of when we get hits of dopamine, and goes after these like a monkey after peanuts.
This lady is just using a metaphor, saying "I wish I didn't know now, what I didn't know then."
But unless you look at your own thinking the way Karl does, you will never really be able to understand either your own motivations, or how you are being manipulated by others who may have their own agendas that have nothing to do with your well being.
With all due respect to our host--I think Biden loses the personality race as well. Donald Trump is loudmouthed, rude and crude--sometimes. Maybe frequently. But Joe Biden can be petty and nasty. On balance I'll take rude and crude --served up along with a soupcon of humor, over petty, nasty and occasionally vicious. Just sayin'.
Alan Watts "I" Illustrated by South Park
Even in his best days, Joe Biden was a profoundly ignorant, arrogant, and corrupt man. His obvious mental decline makes him far removed from his best days. The policies that he (or more likely, his handlers) enact are bad for the country, and his mental and moral weakness has created a dangerous power vacuum. This is likely to be a dangerous year while countries with ill intent seek to take advantage of America's weakness.
If the democrats argue policy they cease to exist.
"You can't beat something with nothing."
Sure you can... with enough ballot fraud.
I always figured, watching that show, that Ricky Gervais was extremely clever, but that Karl was highly intelligent, and most of the mockery of Karl was aimed at the Dunning-Kruger crowd.
Rhhardin quoted Ryle saying…
“It would be similarly absurd to speak of … ‘my body battling with fatigue’.”
I definitely disagree with that one. I have had times, mainly in my twenties, where I’ve done hard demanding physical labor to the point of physical exhaustion, yet my mind was still alert and active.
Biden: Open borders.
Biden: no Voter ID, massive illegals voting in our elections
Biden: Green energy graft taking tax payer dollars and funneling it all to wealth ywhite elites.
Biden: Abortion on demand. No limits.
Biden: War machine war machine war machine
Biden: High inflation - no end in sight. Lies about it.
Small world. She's Bret Stephens' ex-wife.
First of all Ricky Gervaise is a genious. BTW Carl is in on it.
Can someone. Anyone. Tell us what Bidens policies are? I mean other than to destroy the middle class. He's doing a brilliant job of that.
Paul goes on to argue that the Biden campaign should stress substantive policy differences between Trump and Biden. That's what I've been saying too.
I agree with Kevin, but I’ll go even farther. Policy is just about the only reason Trump is a viable candidate at all. Not that many people like the man himself.
What policy differences can Biden, or should I say "Biden," be pushing? He's supposedly the President. He has been able to implement most of his major policies, albeit much of it by executive order and ignoring the law. This is not some hypothetical situation with the candidate championing policies and wanting to implement them in the future. The policies are already implemented. They have been almost universally disastrous.
There's also the matter that he's running against Trump. Trump has all sorts of issues, but Trump has a track record and his policies worked a lot better than Biden's. Campaigning on your policies which haven't worked against someone whose policies have objectively worked far better is not something one normally wants to do. Note this is not a common situation. A former president running against the sitting president is pretty unusual.
There's a reason why the Democrats have been focused on Trump's character, especially through (corrupt) lawfare, and blaming Republicans for their own policies. They can't run on their own policies. Their own policies are not only terrible, but proven terrible.
"You're admitting that you know things that would hurt Biden's campaign, and you won't share it with the voters. You just wish you didn't know."
Althouse! The poor woman is just doing what you pay her to do! I'll bet if you check your credit card statement, you will see it right there; "egregious lies and evasions". You paid for it, and they are delivering it. Think how upset you would be if you had paid all that money to NYT, and they did not inundate you with half-baked lies and superficial musings on non-existent facts, together with advertisements cleverly designed by expensive bots to delude you into purchasing worthless garbage (that's where the real money goes). Kiddo, you're getting what you ordered. This is exactly what the product you selected is supposed to look like!
"Alan Watts "I" Illustrated by South Park"
Thanks! That was excellent.
Made me think of that awful old George Harrison lyric: "Use my body like a car/Taking me both near and far...."
It used to be easy to assume that Democrats had to lie to get elected. I'm not so sure now.I linked to a poll yesterday claiming the only 23% of Dems thought border security was more important than a "path to citizenship." My reaction was, "That's possible."
Today's Democrats are defined by defective educations, hatred of Repubs, particularly Trump, and the dictates of their politicians. Their politicians are defined by the delusions of the leftist bubblemedia.
“I read somewhere the argument that the actual Democrat candidate is Harris. The odds that Biden would live four more years as POTUS, with its stresses, are long. The GOP should pass him by and focus on her. Run against Kamala.”
Yes, I can see that. They want us to ignore how badly FJB and his handlers have screwed up this country in less than 4 years, with a weak economy, significant inflation, massive uncontrolled immigration, destroying our energy independence and military preparedness as quickly as they could, esp with their fervent support for his Ukrainian paymasters, plus just stupid craziness about social, and esp gender, issues. Please ignore how horribly we have done running the country, and instead focus on how epic it is going to be when an inarticulate, elitist, half Indian and half Caribbean, pretend Black, woman, who slept her way to power, becomes President.
"Biden. He has more experience, and he is more predictable too, an old school politician." - Putin, Whose every breath is a lie.
Wow, even Bedbug wasn't far enough left for her?
Highlighting Biden’s brain issues, NYPost columnist Miranda Devine: “Denial is a river in Mexico”. It took a moment.
"Your brain is you."
Quaestor is definitely inside his head. His limbs and his organs are important, but the loss of any of those parts would not diminish him. That someone could locate his personhood in some other part of his anatomy is literally incomprehensible to me. I cannot imagine any condition other than the brain being the container of the self, yet ancient literature, history, and archeology all agree that my brain-centric conception of myself is far from what was conventional from the distant unlettered past until quite recent times.
In my senior year, I attended a symposium on the cultural aspects of Western versus Eastern philosophy. The main speakers were four professors -- two philosophers, a historian, and one who taught religion. One of the four was Tom Regan, the others I don't recall by name. The religion guy may have been a guest because I don't believe we even had a religion department.
At any rate, as the discussion carried on the subject of self became a topic. For example, the Abrahamic religions associate the heart with the soul, perhaps even locating the self within that organ. Classical paganism did so as well. I recall Aristotle speculating that the brain's function was to cool the blood, leaving the heart as the seat of reason. The Bible has nothing to say about the brain. Searching Strong's Exhaustive Concordance returns zero hits for brain, while heart returns 513 hits. Julian Jaynes points out that pneûma (πνεῦμα) in the New Testament is usually translated as soul or spirit, whereas in the Iliad it means breath. The heroes go hurrying down to Hades when they stop breathing, though they can bleed and remain alive. Consequently, from the Mediterranean Bronze Age to classical times the self is somewhere in the chest. In contrast, Buddhism and Daoism more often speak of the stomach region as the center of being, which may be connected to appetite, one of those desires the Buddha seeks to annihilate. When we're hungry we're aware that it's the belly that's in need.
Locating the self within the torso may have universal and primeval. For example, the great Mesoamerican civilizations, cultures that developed with no influence from the civilizations of the Old World, nevertheless agreed with the Old World's evaluation of the heart. When the Mexica (commonly but inaccurately known as Aztecs) made a sacrifice to their gods, it was the heart they were after, to excise it, still beating, to toss into the sacred flames. The rest of the body was discarded like the husks of maize, though they did value the skull as a sort of tally marker, one skull representing one heart offered to the gods. The brains of the sacrificed appear nowhere in the accounts, perhaps they were eaten along with the limbs. Curiously, their Inca contemporaries valued the brain over the heart. Their cultic rituals were focused on the brain. The large number of trepanned skulls associated with Incan sites, many exhibiting clear evidence of healing, are mute testimony of their cultural fascination with that convoluted mass. Judging from the material to the Incas the brain was where it was at. What exactly they thought of the brain is conjectural only. When an Incan surgeon cut into someone's skull what was the goal? Who knows? However, they seem to have been more interested in the forebrain than other regions.
In the West, the centrality of the heart obviously diminished but it's not clear when, although Shakespeare explicitly associates the brain with the mind by 1603 at the latest. His Macbeth reasons away that daggar of the mind as a product of the heat-oppressed brain. The heart remained closely associated with the emotions right through to the 19th century, but more and more in a metaphorical sense only.
I tried to explain to a friend of mine what the brain is and my basic answer is this:
The brain is an amazing pattern matching machine that sits in a pool of juices that like to mess with it.
Because of snakes, humanity has built rocket ships.
The "Mockingbird Media" propaganda mills are on the verge of extinction. You'd think the editors would lean harder on their writers not to expose the kayfabe behind the curtain, lest they ruin the public's delusion that we are served by a free, unbiased, and courageous press.
The brain pervades the entire body, especially the gut which is the specialty chemical plant where trillions of slave organisms churn out molecules to feed cellular functions.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6469458/
The gut-brain axis is a bidirectional communication network that links the enteric and central nervous systems. This network is not only anatomical, but it extends to include endocrine, humoral, metabolic, and immune routes of communication as well. The autonomic nervous system, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and nerves within the gastrointestinal tract, all link the gut and the brain, allowing the brain to influence intestinal activities, including activity of functional immune effector cells; and the gut to influence mood, cognition, and mental health.
"Your brain is you."
Unless you're a South Sea Islander then; "This brains for you!"
Years from now, some brave Biden staffer will write a book about how bad things really were.
It will not be pretty.
But it will prove the existence of a shadow government that operates no matter who is in 'power.'
Of course, that person will die in a car accident just prior to publication, so I guess we'll never know...
Democracy DIES in Darkness!
it's not a warning.. It's a Pledge
It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
I think Karl was asking a legitimate question that Gervais was wrong to blow off. "You are your brain." Fine, but not very helpful. Your brain does all sorts of things without you asking it to, even without your wanting it to.
There's a thing where you can jog your memory through distraction--people often get their best ideas while doing something else. Or, like Karl, you actively think of things to put on a list, and then something pops up later, after you finished your list and moved on to something else. Your brain often works at odds with your desires.
Gervais understands that your heart isn't "you," your hands and feet and nose aren't "you." Why does it seem so crazy to him that, even if whatever it is that makes you you is located in your brain, that there may nevertheless be parts of your brain that aren't you just like your stomach isn't you?
Karl is correct in his intuition.
"You" are only one of several processes in your brain.
And "you" are not in control, "you" only have one vote, and sometimes "you" will be outvoted.
Re: "I" by Alan Watts
He made some specious claims that one assumes were made to support whatever he was trying to demonstrate. For example, "Where there are no bees, there are no flowers, and where there are no flowers, there are no bees." But this is not true. In general, flowers rely on pollinators, but not all are bees. Some may be aware that mosquitoes flourish in many arctic regions, which is odd given that we typically think of them in connection with tropical conditions. But they're there, nonetheless, in clouds that are known to stampede caribou. But it's only the females that bite. Where do the males get their energy? From flowers. In fact, hundreds of tundra flower species are exclusively pollinated by mosquitoes, thus sometimes no bees do not equal no flowers. There are many other exceptions to Watts' bee-flower rule. Some flowers are hostile to bees and have taken measures to exclude them from their lifecycle, night bloomers for example. Some of nightbloomers are exclusively pollinated by bats. Why? Maybe they don't like the buzzing. Other flowers arrange themselves to attract hummingbirds. If we assume the viewpoint of evolution, we may speak of bees and flowers undergoing co-evolution, but they are not inextricably linked as Watts suggests. Though they have evolved together in many cases, the flowers came first, by 40 million years. If bees disappeared tomorrow, flowers would persist. They have subtle and powerful ways to co-opt us animals into serving their ends. If we disappear, flowers will persist. Plants colonized the land millions of years before any multicellular animal could tolerate the conditions that prevailed about the waterline. While it is true those first plant pioneers were the primitive spore-bearing ancestors of ferns and horsetails, the entire plant kingdom still retains the instructions for life without critters. They tolerate and exploit us, but they don't depend on us.
Life is not bound to the existing conditions quite so tightly that we can even vaguely suggest some sort of shared identity with the environment. The environment changes, and it does nothing but change, the fact that many don't notice it changing is indicative of our shortsightedness. And lifeforms adapt, sometimes by evolving, by becoming new creatures. Sometimes by adapting their behaviors, evolving new ways to be an old creature, so to speak. Humans, especially.
Alan Watts had an entertaining style, but his philosophy was codswallop.
Tim Maguire writes, "Your brain often works at odds with your desires."
What part of Tim Maguire has desires if not his brain, keeping in mind that what Tim Maguire desires and what Tim Maguire requires are not necessarily identical?
I certainly understand internal conflict. Part of Quaestor's brain longs for the pleasure of sweetness. If the less dumb regions of his brain were less assertive, he'd be either one of those naked bed-ridden human slugs or dead from an insulin crisis. But he's not (Inga curses under her breath) because of certain internal conflicts being resolved in favor of reduced stupidity.
It may be that all higher animals have this conflict, but every species I'm aware of can stop fucking long enough to obtain food and avoid predation, that is, when mad science doesn't interfere. A few real lunatics like Robert Galbraith Heath proved that brain stimulation reinforcement can overwhelm our smarts.
Tim in Vermont writes, "Karl is right. So was that 'bicameral mind' guy..."
The guy was Julian Jaynes, and the book is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I read that one in 1980 because I found in the remainder bin at Borders substantially discounted. I was enthralled by his theory at first but became disenchanted about two-thirds of the way through. I didn't see a plausible mechanism for the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness.
Much of the bicameral theory derives from slit-brain research done with subjects who had undergone corpus callosotomy for refractive epilepsy, many of whom were war veterans who had received head wounds. Follow-on interviews and neurological tests revealed some odd conditions in some patients, particularly left-side agnosia. From there the split-brain condition led to the two-brain speculation. Since then, current research has generally debunked the two-brain notion, which has knocked the foundation from under the Jaynes bicameral mind theory.
There was another study that showed how brains can be fucked up by stimulation reinforcement. The one I'm thinking of involves cocaine addiction. Rats were offered a choice between nutritious food and a nutrient-inert substance laced with cocaine. Some rats ate their fill of the good stuff and then nibbled the cocaine treat for dessert, but others would remain at the cocaine station, eating it to the exclusion of real food until they fell into a coma.
Libertarians didn't like that one.
"I didn't see a plausible mechanism for the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness."
I agree, I guess I was being flippant, but the Epic of Gilgamesh describes just such a transition, basically Gilgamesh is visited by a whore, not one who gives him an apple, but one who screws his brains out for week, and he comes out of it conscious and no longer able to mingle peacefully with the animals.
But you can't simply hide the candidate and forefront the party's policy agenda as if the man is nothing at all. You can't beat something with nothing.
It worked last time.
"You can't beat something with nothing."
They did last time. Remember, as Stalin said, it's not who votes, it's who's counting the votes.
Tim in Vermont writes, "...but the Epic of Gilgamesh describes just such a transition, basically Gilgamesh is visited by a whore, not one who gives him an apple, but one who screws his brains out for week, and he comes out of it conscious and no longer able to mingle peacefully with the animals."
That's the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the chap whom the whore visits is Enkidu, a man so alien to normal human society that he grazes with the wild cattle. (The harlot is called Shamhat, btw) After that experience, the wild beast flees from Enkidu, whom they now recognize as human and therefore a danger. This transformation is more akin to Adam's fall in Genesis than the god/slave relationship Jaynes posited for the pre-conscious mentality of his bicameral mind.
It’s a metaphor, and I admit that I never could keep the characters straight and wasn’t about to read it again on my phone, but it is a description of the transition, and maybe the story of the Fall is a highly abstracted description of the same transformation to consciousness. I highly doubt that our consciousness ever existed in the subconscious mind, I think that whatever was there before consciousness is still there, mute, living within our brain, and that consciousness arose possibly in the evolution of modern humans, and that day can never be known.
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