I'm starting to lose faith in mankind at an alarming rate

Isis · 2011-04-24T22:57:44+00:00

I just got sent a link of a video involving pretty shocking footage of a pig farm in the US. I'm Afrikaans and I love my meat as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure whether or not I'll be able to carry on like this. I've always felt like I was supporting crap such as this by buying factory farmed meat. I've never seriously considered going vegan though. On the one hand I'm aware of the fact that one consumer is not going to change the world, and whether I continue to eat meat or not is irrelevant. On the other hand I cannot help but feel that I'm the sort of person that stands up for what he believes in, even if I'm standing alone. I don't want to be the type of person that compromises his values because "everyone is doing it". Or it's "normal", we need protein.....bla bla bla. We pride ourselves on the fact that we are sentient beings that can put ourselves in another shoes. Why the hell do we insist on torturing animals for the sake of stuffing ourselves full of food that go way beyond our dietary requirements? I'm so furious I could kill these assholes with my bare hands, but I'm afraid they're just the product of our wondrous and progressive society. I'm beginning to think that consumerism is not that great after all. I'm so ashamed of being human right now it's not even funny ☹ I'm sorry for posting this on the forum but I feel like I need to share this with someone.

[deleted]

I knew when I first posted that this was purely for the enjoyment of debating and for the pleasure of releasing my point of view on to the world. There are a lot of public and school holidays this week. Guess how I like to spend my time.

vic

Viccy wrote I knew when I first posted that this was purely for the enjoyment of debating and for the pleasure of releasing my point of view on to the world. There are a lot of public and school holidays this week. Guess how I like to spend my time.

No, tell us ??
In my case...it's so cold and wet in Stellenbosch, I had to spend mine indoors today, and mostly in front of this keyboard ?

Isis

Vic, I'd like to pick your brain a bit here. I always find it fascinating that one of our most successful theories, as far as predictive validity go, also leaves us stumped. Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense to us on an intuitive level. Given the recent developments in physics such as M theory, do you think we'll eventually hit a wall because no amount of experimentation can either confirm or falsify a theory?

[deleted]

No, tell us ??

I think I gave you a big enough clue in the first sentence of my post, but other than this it would be playing music, spending time with children I teach, painting and dancing. This feels like a single's add.

various unseen narratives or linguistic paradigms that influence how we see the world

That's why I prefer actions to words. People's prejudices are soon apparent when they can no longer hide behind floral verbosity. Music is a wonderful way around linguistic paradigms and people can't argue with you about it. The emotional impact is immediate and contagious. If you make a room full of people happy to be alive, ready to learn more about the world around them, improve their life and make connections with others they wouldn't have normally made WITHOUT using words, you've made the world a better place. Then again it does depend on the intention of the musician. That's my intention anyway.

Isis

Viccy, I do appreciate your comments. I also think you make some good arguments. I think I've found a way to express where we may be differing. To me the very act of observation or speaking implies prejudice. The types of problems we are concerned with are handed down to us from our ancestors. The philosophical field of hermeneutics (of which Habermas was a particularly influential figure btw) tries to come to grips with the linguistic nature of our understanding. Humans are fundamentally linguistic beings. The language that you speak biases the way you think. Hermeneutic philosopher often describe our linguistic mediated understanding by utilizing the metaphor of a horizon. These smart-poets are those individuals that manage to ever so slightly expand our horizon of understanding. To me, this expansion is not going to lead anywhere other than giving us novel ways of describing our world. That's better than stagnation though.

Ooooh. Almost forgot to add that these novel descriptions can make us more aware of the fact that we may be causing a lot of needless suffering by using animals as commodities. Instead of getting stuck in blind consumerism, why not render creative descriptions that allow us to create a world where animals need not suffer beyond what is necessary? This video was a creative redescription that served up a nice plate of cognitive dissonance, to me at least. In order to escape from this psychological discomfort I could either ignore it or I can change my behavior to include this new description in the way I think about animals and my relationship with them. I chose to do the latter.

Jack-Flash-Jr

It's comparatively easy to change one's relationship to animals, to fellow humans it's far more difficult.

That's why I prefer actions to words.

+ 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

That's not to say words aren't entertaining or don't lead to a better understanding but the basic principles of getting along with each other, animals and nature have been laid out for a LONG time already.

Bob-Dubery

Isis wrote Vic, I'd like to pick your brain a bit here. I always find it fascinating that one of our most successful theories, as far as predictive validity go, also leaves us stumped. Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense to us on an intuitive level. Given the recent developments in physics such as M theory, do you think we'll eventually hit a wall because no amount of experimentation can either confirm or falsify a theory?

Science and intuition seldom coincide. If the discoveries that science makes were intuitive nobody would need to make them. There's a lot of things we take for granted now because they've always been there for us. Electromagnetism for example. But somebody had to sit and figure those things out and at the time they were not intuitive at all. They seem so to us now because like duh dude! Everybody knows that.

"Us" being people who have had some kind of western style school education. Some of those primitive peoples in the South American jungles might be astonished at a demonstration of electromagnetism.

vic

Isis wrote Vic, I'd like to pick your brain a bit here. I always find it fascinating that one of our most successful theories, as far as predictive validity go, also leaves us stumped. Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense to us on an intuitive level. Given the recent developments in physics such as M theory, do you think we'll eventually hit a wall because no amount of experimentation can either confirm or falsify a theory?

Even in Einstein's time attempts were made to have a single set of equations (the unified field theory) which describes everything eg the strong nuclear force, the weak force, electomagnetism and gravity, the latter being the elusive entity. This has not happened as yet. String theory was a new attempt at that. Now, M theory is an attempt at unifying the 5 String theories.....it describes 11 dimensions in which gravity, or the particle associate with it, (graviton) is hidden. Because we mortals can only detect stuff in 4 dimensions (3 space dimensions+time) the graviton and the Higgs boson (the particle that is associated with mass) is undetectable with our current instrumentation. Are these all real...? Theoretical physics predicts that moments after the Big Bang the forces mentioned above separated from one another, together with the particles associated with each, into the multiple dimensions that M theory describes. Now how does one unlock all this ?
That's where the CERN experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) come in....here high energy conditions, as at the moment of the Big Bang, is hoped to be created, revealing the particles such as the Higgs boson and the Graviton in our familiar dimensions, and thus can be detected. IF this succeeds the reality of multiple dimensions (M theory) will be confirmed.
So to answer part of your question....we can detect and explain most things in our familiar dimensions...particles and other stuff which are not within these dimensions will remain undetectable, at least for the moment.
Quantum mechanics is a devil ?......here you only deal with probabilities......it's highly mathematical and mind boggling. However it has huge application in modern electronics and solid state physics...it's very real indeed.

Jack-Flash-Jr

vic wrote
Isis wrote Vic, I'd like to pick your brain a bit here. I always find it fascinating that one of our most successful theories, as far as predictive validity go, also leaves us stumped. Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense to us on an intuitive level. Given the recent developments in physics such as M theory, do you think we'll eventually hit a wall because no amount of experimentation can either confirm or falsify a theory?
Even in Einstein's time attempts were made to have a single set of equations (the unified field theory) which describes everything eg the strong nuclear force, the weak force, electomagnetism and gravity, the latter being the elusive entity. This has not happened as yet. String theory was a new attempt at that. Now, M theory is an attempt at unifying the 5 String theories.....it describes 11 dimensions in which gravity, or the particle associate with it, (graviton) is hidden. Because we mortals can only detect stuff in 4 dimensions (3 space dimensions+time) the graviton and the Higgs boson (the particle that is associated with mass) is undetectable with our current instrumentation. Are these all real...? Theoretical physics predicts that moments after the Big Bang the forces mentioned above separated from one another, together with the particles associated with each, into the multiple dimensions that M theory describes. Now how does one unlock all this ?
That's where the CERN experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) come in....here high energy conditions, as at the moment of the Big Bang, is hoped to be created, revealing the particles such as the Higgs boson and the Graviton in our familiar dimensions, and thus can be detected. IF this succeeds the reality of multiple dimensions (M theory) will be confirmed.
So to answer part of your question....we can detect and explain most things in our familiar dimensions...particles and other stuff which are not within these dimensions will remain undetectable, at least for the moment.
Quantum mechanics is a devil ?......here you only deal with probabilities......it's highly mathematical and mind boggling. However it has huge application in modern electronics and solid state physics...it's very real indeed.

I just finished Hawking's latest (The Grand Design) a few weeks ago... there was an astonishing lack of conclusions. Very appropriate ?

singemonkey

Grist for the Mill: US states seek to criminalise undercover filming of slaughterhouse activities because horrors have been uncovered.

http://bittman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/animals-cruelty-and-videotape/?pagemode=print

It does seriously make me wonder what's going on behind the closed doors of ours. The statement, "...chicks being ground alive," chilled me to the bone. Perhaps self-imposed ignorance is not an excuse when it comes to atrocities.

Jack-Flash-Jr

singemonkey wrote Grist for the Mill: US states seek to criminalise undercover filming of slaughterhouse activities because horrors have been uncovered.

http://bittman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/animals-cruelty-and-videotape/?pagemode=print

Now I feel ill.

vic

The Grand Design has a lot on Reality and our perceival of reality. It is highly philosophical in this regard and maybe Isis will find it interesting and applicable in his field.

[deleted]

I think it's also illegal there to film unjustified police violence and distribute it. True it isn't happening here(yet), but it sets a bad precedent.

Perhaps some investigation into our own slaughter house system is advisable. I shall do the research. I do remember watching a TV show a while back on how it became illegal for farms to slaughter their own animals. The only option left to them was transporting them over a long distance where they had to wait to be slaughtered at a designated slaughter house. Basically it dragged out the whole process, making it more distressing for the animals and less cost effective for everyone except a large abattoir company. I guess that is worth following up.

Isis

vic wrote
Isis wrote Vic, I'd like to pick your brain a bit here. I always find it fascinating that one of our most successful theories, as far as predictive validity go, also leaves us stumped. Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense to us on an intuitive level. Given the recent developments in physics such as M theory, do you think we'll eventually hit a wall because no amount of experimentation can either confirm or falsify a theory?
Even in Einstein's time attempts were made to have a single set of equations (the unified field theory) which describes everything eg the strong nuclear force, the weak force, electomagnetism and gravity, the latter being the elusive entity. This has not happened as yet. String theory was a new attempt at that. Now, M theory is an attempt at unifying the 5 String theories.....it describes 11 dimensions in which gravity, or the particle associate with it, (graviton) is hidden. Because we mortals can only detect stuff in 4 dimensions (3 space dimensions+time) the graviton and the Higgs boson (the particle that is associated with mass) is undetectable with our current instrumentation. Are these all real...? Theoretical physics predicts that moments after the Big Bang the forces mentioned above separated from one another, together with the particles associated with each, into the multiple dimensions that M theory describes. Now how does one unlock all this ?
That's where the CERN experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) come in....here high energy conditions, as at the moment of the Big Bang, is hoped to be created, revealing the particles such as the Higgs boson and the Graviton in our familiar dimensions, and thus can be detected. IF this succeeds the reality of multiple dimensions (M theory) will be confirmed.
So to answer part of your question....we can detect and explain most things in our familiar dimensions...particles and other stuff which are not within these dimensions will remain undetectable, at least for the moment.
Quantum mechanics is a devil ?......here you only deal with probabilities......it's highly mathematical and mind boggling. However it has huge application in modern electronics and solid state physics...it's very real indeed.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but we obviously don't have observational access to these higher dimensions since we are stuck in sub-space of the "bulk" (weird thought btw). So one of the ways in which we hope to gain an indication as to whether the higher dimensions necessitated by string theory do exist, is to observe something that can bleed over into these dimensions such as the graviton. Where do we go from there though? At best that would be an indication that we are on the right track. At best we'd be formulating a theory based upon incomplete information. as is very often the case, what we don't know we don't know is a serious problem. Do you think we'll end up in a situation where we cannot formulate a complete theory of "existence" or the "bulk" or what have you, because our cognitive abilities have been shaped by a much less complex reality?

The reason I'm asking this, is because I'm busy reading up on the work of Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez regarding embodied cognition. I find this line of thought absolutely fascinating. In a nutshell these guys argue that our cognitive abilities where shaped by the way in which we interact with the world. So our physical markup, combined with our environment and evolutionary concerns shaped the way we think. This may not sound very profound, but the systematic way in which they set out to map our cognitive abilities using this paradigm yield some startling results. According to these guys we can only understand though metaphor. In order to formulate a new concept we must first link it to something we already know by generating an appropriate metaphor.

"What the hell is that thing?"
"Well, it's a car. It's like a bicycle with four wheels and the thing doing the pedaling is a machine that relies on combustion for propulsion"

Accordingly, one of the reasons why we might be at a loss to completely grasp the quantum world or higher dimensional planes, is because our cognitive abilities were shaped by 4 dimentional space-time; we do not have an adequate base to generate appropriate metaphors for quantum mechanics, hence our lack of understanding. Our cognitive abilities were shaped by experiencing time and space as linear and static.

If you get a chance you should take a look at one of these books:

Lakoff and Nunez "Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being"
Lakoff and Johnson "Metaphors We Live By"
Johnson "The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason"

Jack-Flash-Jr

?

Thread divergence theory.

Isis

vic wrote The Grand Design has a lot on Reality and our perceival of reality. It is highly philosophical in this regard and maybe Isis will find it interesting and applicable in his field.

I'll be sure to get my filthy paws on a copy ?

Bob-Dubery

I'm still trying to get past the fact (fact, I say) that man has five times as many fingers as ears but only twice as many ears as noses. Which is weird when you think about it, but nobody does, which just goes to show that we should question assumptions more often or something.

Isis

Jack Flash Jr wrote ?

Thread divergence theory.

I've managed to hijack my own thread. ?

Wait a minute.....

See, if we can prove the existence of higher dimensions, then maybe there are higher dimensional beings in the form of cows or pigs living among us. Douglas Adams proposed this theory, although he got it slightly wrong by postulating that mice are higher dimensional beings. If we end up eating these higher dimensional beings we might be pissing them off and they'll refuse to share the secrets of the universe with us. The only way to avoid this is by becoming vegetarians.

Thus theoretical physics is applicable to the thread ?

Isis

"To prevent such whistleblowing, several states have passed so-called “Ag-gag” laws that would make it illegal to clandestinely film inside slaughterhouses, sparking what animal rights activists fear will be a nationwide trend"

I think this, at the very least, should alert us to the fact that animals are indeed considered a commodity by these farmers. Farming on a large scale will invariably involve atrocities or animal rights violations, since wasting time and money on treating animals humanely will negatively affect the amount of profit they'll make. The fact that the government supports them also gives us an indication that economic ends are being pursued at the cost of animal rights, which does not generate profit.

vic

@Isis..on cognitive abilities. Very superficially....take the smartest dog or cat or parrot or monkey (Singe is excluded) you know...for these beings 2+2=4, does not make sense at all....they are cognitively locked in at their levels of being. The very same with us. We also have our limits. BUT we are aware of this...that's the difference and thus we are devising ways of looking outside of our box...the 4 dimensional world.
Where all this will end, I don't know. :-\

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