On 25 Feb 2013, at 14:56, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 8:14 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 22 Feb 2013, at 17:21, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
"The people who most hate smokers are ex-smokers."
- PGC's father
Since this thread has become a bit personal, I offer the view of a
former judge of the German supreme court, who himself was not a
smoker, nor did ever smoke:
"It's not really the passive smoking that bothers people, with
exception of course to people trapped in a close working
environment where everybody smokes and smoking is permitted. It's
not the smell on their clothes either, since we have invented
washing machines and dry cleaning. We need an attitude change
instead of more rules: I think public spaces should regulate
themselves and find creative ways to not "lock anybody out", such
as air vents over smoking sections of a bar, or that smokers at a
bar will restrain themselves and be prepared to step outside if a
guest with asthma arrives etc.
The main issue is that everybody has vices and everybody in Germany
has the constitutional right to act irresponsibly on personal
choice matters that do not significantly hurt others. Significant
harm is an open term here, to be calibrated by judges case-by-case.
So the outrage on public smoking is people projecting their
judgement of their own vices onto easy targets: passive smoking is
a great example. Nobody has a problem walking through smoggy
Berlin, Los Angeles, New York where particle emissions from fossil
fuels of their SUVs also driven by non-smokers 'make my clothes
stink, make me inhale carcinogens, cancerous toxins. Indeed,
studies confirm that some cities have been deemed equivalent to
smoking a few cigarettes a day, in terms of inhaled toxins.
So why the fuss? People like to project what they dislike about
themselves onto others behavior and feel the righteousness of
judging right from wrong. I know this because I have been a judge
all of my life; but I also know that the feeling is illusory and
that these questions are much more difficult than our personal
ethics. You can find temporary solutions to such issues and
minimize harm. But you'll never get rid of the problem via
regulation. You just move towards more extremism and uniformity.
After all it is our imperfections that make us interesting. I've
never smoked in my life, but passive smoke doesn't bother me, I
even appreciate the smell of pipe tobacco. It's like I am
transported to the orient."
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 6:27 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 20 Feb 2013, at 14:59, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
All classical psychedelics exhibit anti-addictive properties. Sure,
people can't do mescaline or LSD regularly enough, i.e. every few
days to every day,
How is using every day (or every few days) not an addictive
behavior ? Seems quite strange to say that to have **anti**
addictive properties, you should use it like an addict, seems
contradictory.
This does not necessarily follow. Many people can use some
medication daily, without getting addicted.
Taking salvia everyday asks for a big effort. I call it the "huile
de foie de morue" of the drugs (Cod liver oil).
...
In fact, except in forum, I see very few people developing an
interest for that experience (except as a medication). But then I
don't know so much people interested in the consequence of comp or
in "serious" theology either. Salvia has this in common with comp:
it does not go handy with wishful thinking. It has other
relationship with comp, like insisting on some secrecy of a part of
the experience, which corroborates the G/G* distinction.
And that is the part which I have difficulty with and why I keep it
at a close but rare distance. The joke seems immense and euphoric
in its own terms, but the relevant brain subroutines, if you
permit, are offended by every letter I type here, so there is some
sense of stepping over a threshold that is a prohibited hack.
Intuitively a question would be: "So why was I invited?" The small
composer and the skeptic in me don't like this, even though they
know ultimately "resistance is futile".
Yes, I understand.
I will not add much, as I might say things on which I have to remain
silent ... if I want to maintain good relation with the "lady". :)
Now, the secrecy problematic is a constant problem in theology, but
also in a large part of psychology and medicine. We can guess it is
normal, as brain are wired for terrestrial survival, which on some
point can conflict with other form of survival. Then with comp it
can be formally related to the fact that Bx -> ~ x, admits
solutions, like self-consistency (Dt) by Gödel's second
incompleteness theorem. The whole G* minus G describes the landscape
of the correct machine's secret. Comp makes some secret
"conditionally" communicable, in the form "as far as I am consistent
then ...".
That seems plausible, as far as I understand:
The context of G* and G in your use of comp are provability logics
for self-referential correct machines. The provability logic G
formalizes arithmetic provability and consistency in sufficiently
rich machines, like PA or ZF. What separates G from G* is Bp->p.
Yes. The axioms of G* are:
1) all theorems of G
2) Bp -> p
Another key difference is that G* is close for the modus ponens rule
(a, a->b / b),
but NOT for the necessitation rule (a / Ba).
If that was not the case we would have that G* proves f, and be
inconsistent.
Indeed we would have in G* the following proof:
Bf -> f (by axiom 2 above)
B(Bf -> f) (by the necessitation rule)
B(Bf -> f) -> Bf (by Löb's formula, main theorem of G, and thus by
"1" above)
Bf (by modus ponens on the two last lines)
f (by modus ponens on the line just above and the first line (5 line
above))
(and f -> p is a tautology, so any proposition can be proved and G* is
inconsistent).
This points towards incompleteness of Gödel's second incompleteness
theorem, essentially -Bf -> -B-Bf,
Yes. By Löb we have B(Bf -> f) -> Bf. If you remind that Bf->f is
equivalent with ~Bf, you can see how to derive
easily -Bf -> -B-Bf, from Löb. OK?
so if all the propositions Bp -> p are true about the machine, they
cannot be believed by the machine.
They cannot all be believed. But the machine can still believe Bp ->
p, for some p. Indeed she will believe this for, and only for, those p
that she can prove.
But the machine cannot believe in ~Bf. She can't believe in Bf -> f.
By default a consistent machine believes in its own inconsistency.
This does not follow. The consistent machine does not believe in its
own consistency. That does not entail she believes in its own
inconsistency. In particular, if she is correct (a stronger statement
than consistency), then she will neither believe in its consistency,
nor in its inconsistency. She will be forever agnostic about that.
Sort of like "the unbelievable truth gap" about which G* must remain
silent, am I reading you correctly?
G must remains silent, or the correct machine, whose believable logic
of belief is given G, must remain silent.
G* is not silent. *He*, like us for simpler machine than us, can know
that the machine is consistent. So he can "believe" in ~Bf, but that
concerns the machine, not itself.
G* knows all modal truth about the machine, and G* minus G contains
all the secret.
The machine cannot believe what her G* is saying, but she can find
those truth by other ways.
As for Quentin, I think he's right: poisons are a contradiction.
For beside their danger and pleasure, they are equally solvents,
medicines, cleansers or Cod liver oil (hemp seed oil trumps
industrial fish farms with antibiotics etc., as I am sure you know,
it is cheaper too). Perhaps they harm us when we don't have our
numbers right, concerning dosage and context. "Be precise with the
values" Paracelsus said famously.
Also Quentin, have you mixed MJ with toboacco when you suffered?
Because that mixture is narcotic, when MJ on its own is more self-
limiting.
That's a good question.
MJ + alcohol can also be quite narcotic for some person. Combination
of medication is known to be hazardous, and should be handle with
caution.
I agree with what you say below. I think that prohibition is just a
criminal technic to sell more drugs, without control of quality, nor
control of price, in a way making it possible to target the kids, at
every corner of every street. LEAP (http://www.leap.cc/) provides
many evidences. The evidences are monumental that the more a drug is
severely prohibited in a country, the more it is consumed in that
country.
Prohibition makes de facto a nationalization of health, which is the
complex locus where safety can be maximized by augmenting the
competition.
If we legalize all drugs, and tax them relatively to genuine
statistics of problems, people would quickly see which products are
"really" dangerous.
The very idea of criminalizing an abuse problem, that is an health
problem, is a total non sense. It makes a fake sense through the
myth that the good should fight the bad, where the good can only
help the bad toward less bad.
Addiction can be cured with iboga, together with some psychological
accompaniment. Jail only aggravates the "problem of drugs", itself
brought by prohibition.
bruno
At least you see some articles from increasingly mainstream media
that you wouldn't see a few years ago:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/global-support-grows-for-legalizing-drugs-a-884750.html
Yes, the news are rather good. I stay calm, because I said this
already in the seventies, ...
But it is wonderful that the state of Washington and Colorado have
legalized both medical and recreative cannabis.
When the UN asked to President Obama to do something, about Colorado
and Washington, it is a relief and pleasure he answered them that he
has other priorities.
And now some pressure arrived from the financial world, which means
they begin to wake up. They can't *afford* the big lie, and it is good
they say so. The war on drugs cost trillions, and those who benefit
from it, are more and more clearly appearing as small special interest
minorities, and the criminals.
Of course, they don't go far enough or even realize that the
"prohibition side of the argument" is not grounded on any facts and
is not an argument.
Alas, yes. But the cops of LEAP are already 100% clear about that.
People will eventually understand.
At some point, they will not understand how we have been able to think
differently.
They all seem genuinely afraid of what will happen "the moment
everything becomes legally available" with some age and dose
restrictions at some national, government regulated drug provider.
It's clear that a few conservatives will go a bit nuts on coke etc,
but I would predict, that after a phase of abusing the newly found
freedoms, that prohibitionists would use to show "aha, you see we
said it was a bad idea!", people would still emerge from any high
with the same old questions: "How am I managing my life? How's my
family? Long term prospects? Health? My bills, my taxes?". They
think that snorting cocaine "will make people hallucinate those
questions away and we'd have everybody running wild on the streets
in total anarchy".
I am even rather sure there will not be a phase of abusing. Those who
does not already smoke cannabis recreatively will not like it.
The motto of non cannabis smoker above some age is "hmm... I think I
will stick to wine". But the number of person using it for a variety
of medical problems will grow, but they will not abuse.
The question of education comes up, which is serious not in some
ideological sense, just merely on the level of technicalities of
dosing, interactions with other medication, routes of administration
etc.
Yes, but that concerns all Food and Drugs. Consumers have the right to
know about the traceability of the products used, about possible side
effects, the statistics of frequence/dose leading to possible
addiction, etc.
Only salvia contains a user guide inside, which, to be sure, is only
available and "readable" at low dose :)
Because you can be sure that an over-protected poison-naive
population is going to read the warning labels and take the labels
very seriously, like they always do. But for today such questions
are just wishful thinking, when we can even deal with just MJ
legalization.
Some countries have legalized heroin, in some unofficial way, which
helps only the middle class (that's bad), because it was clearly
understood that it diminishes the spread of AIDS. The cops already
explain, sometimes in schools, that the more a drug is dangerous, the
more important we need to legalize it, because legalization is the
only way to regulate it properly. And that's important, about a
dangerous drug.
So I don't worry about this. Cannabis, by its very low dangerousness
(compared to aspirin or alcohol, ...) was the best drug to make
illegal (best for making huge black money benefits for a long time).
So I think that once cannabis will be legal, all the other will
follow, like a card castle, and eventually everyone will understand
that prohibition of food and drugs is just a nonsense in all
directions (ethical, economical, ecological, medical, social, ...).
Some people will still abuse of some products, and 'desintoxication
centers' will develop, but this will concerns *any* products. In
Korea, in all major cities, you have a huge number of
'desintoxication center' specialized in video game addiction. I have
heard about case of death, with person playing continuously, and dying
from lack of water, nutriment, and hygiene. We can overdose with video-
game.
Abuse is a problem, but it is not specific to a product. Of course
some products are more addictive than some others, and that might
point on a threshold for suggesting a medical prescription and social
security financial recovery.
For heroin, there are evidence that the need of doing the experience
again and again is in a large part driven by the fear of no more
finding the product or the money to buy it. Apart from the use of
ibogaine, heroin might be the best antidote to heroin, once it is
prescribed by a doctor, and free. I extrapolate from some studies in
my country, but it makes sense, it seems to me.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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