Sailing and Philosophy
- Thread starter Will Gilmore
- Start date
Will:
Thanks so much for the book recommendations, I will look into those.
I watched one of those brief, introductory-type videos on YouTube about Parmenades, a while ago. It sounded interesting. But wouldn't "all we have to experience Reality are our own senses" make him more of an empiricist than a rationalist? Or am I using the terminology incorrectly?
Thanks so much for the book recommendations, I will look into those.
I watched one of those brief, introductory-type videos on YouTube about Parmenades, a while ago. It sounded interesting. But wouldn't "all we have to experience Reality are our own senses" make him more of an empiricist than a rationalist? Or am I using the terminology incorrectly?
Nope.= 1111.
1111=15 if you only have 2 Fingers to count on.
If you take a byte view
1111=F and even with the Mayan's too.
Jim...
Hmmmm... contemplate this....
What if Archimedes [the pie cutter] had met with the Mayan God of Sacrifice [economics and strife]?
[His name is Buluc Chabtan { God F} lets call him Chab]
________
In their discussion on how thin to cut the Pie = π ...
By this time Archimedes had figured 1/32 or about 3.141
Chab said no way! It is 3.2GC
Thus the Sicilian and the New World representative, fought over which was best...
Pizza or Tacos
The fight has continued through the ages.
Jim...
PS: All good pies
What if Archimedes [the pie cutter] had met with the Mayan God of Sacrifice [economics and strife]?
[His name is Buluc Chabtan { God F} lets call him Chab
]________
In their discussion on how thin to cut the Pie = π ...
By this time Archimedes had figured 1/32 or about 3.141
Chab said no way! It is 3.2GC
Thus the Sicilian and the New World representative, fought over which was best...
Pizza or Tacos
The fight has continued through the ages.
Jim...
PS: All good pies
Yes but...
How thin of a Pizza cutter do YOU have?
____
BTW a Taco is a Mexican Pizza when flat. They just fold it to eat.
Jim...
I can see what you mean. The label, I suspect, was given to him during the "Age of Reason" Aristotle (founder of logic) was the ideal.
I'll take a slice of pi, please 3.142 times around the pie:
+.142 (just to round things off).By the way, JS. I just showed that video to my father. He said he didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Truth can do that to you.
- Will (Dragonfly)
Living in the past presupposes a temporal existence. There are numerous philosophical perspectives that dismiss the existence of time as a matter of pure perception and illusion. The only existence is the momentary existence in which we only have the one momentary "feeling" of a past with nothing but memories and an inaccurate sense of time (really, our sense of time should be included in our list of senses) that leads us to believe we are moving into a future and that we have lived the past. However, how do you demonstrate such a thing as real or unreal?We always live in the past.
Jim...
In a phenominal universe, you are still limited by the passing of time and the awareness only of its memory. In an idealist universe the moment of feeling and illusion of memory is as real as the phenomenal one.
The implications might be that, in an idealist universe, we might choose to experience any sense of the moment we want except, since there is only the moment and no time to move into the next moment, our choice has already been made. In a phenomenal universe, there is no choice to make except what that moment means to you and how you choose to experience it.
I've started reading 'the Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality' by Joseph Clinton Pearce. He talks about the Cosmic Egg being our accepted view of the universe and the cracks are ideas or experiences that challenge and change how we see our universe. The perception of our world creates our world and our world then changes our perception. By moving into a rational, science-based universe, we limit the experiences and fail to notice the cracks that could lead us to expanding our "Cosmic Egg" into more metaphysical possibilities.
- Will (Dragonfly)
We developed using our 5 physical senses... Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight and Hearing
Most of the animal kingdom, used these for the survival of the species.
Since it takes a finite, perhaps infinitesimal, time for the world input to arrive to our 5 detectors [sensors]...
Time has passed
Thus we always Live in the past.
_______
When our ancestors looked at the clear night sky ≈10,000 years ago, he probably saw what we are seeing today.
His perception of what the stars were then and our perception of the stars today, are different.
It is no wonder that when a Comet appeared in the night sky, it struck fear in them.
Metaphysical possibilities are just recently, starting to emerge.
But...
We still use the Sciences to detect and expand our perceptions.
Unfortunately we have nothing else, but our 5 senses.
Thus we live in the past and strive for the future.
Jim...
PS: My head hurts.
Most of the animal kingdom, used these for the survival of the species.
Since it takes a finite, perhaps infinitesimal, time for the world input to arrive to our 5 detectors [sensors]...
Time has passed
Thus we always Live in the past.
_______
When our ancestors looked at the clear night sky ≈10,000 years ago, he probably saw what we are seeing today.
His perception of what the stars were then and our perception of the stars today, are different.
It is no wonder that when a Comet appeared in the night sky, it struck fear in them.
Metaphysical possibilities are just recently, starting to emerge.
But...
We still use the Sciences to detect and expand our perceptions.
Unfortunately we have nothing else, but our 5 senses.
Thus we live in the past and strive for the future.
Jim...
PS: My head hurts.
If there is no past why am I getting older? To be honest I am getting a headache reading through this thread. Guess I'm just not intelligent enough to comprehend all of it.
I think I'll have a beer and go sailing.
Since there has to be about three different threads going about ColRegs, currently, this might be a good time to move into another branch of philosophy, Ethics.
Ethics is about behavior, action, motion, in a sense. The Old Man talks a lot about the idea of there being a direct analogy between Physics and Morality (Morality being the principles upon which ethical behaviors are based). He once met a retired Physicist at a marina who had basically become a recluse on his sailboat and never left the marina. The Old Man invited him to a drink at the marina bar and presented him with this idea. The laws of motion, conservation of energy, they all have their moral analogue. The physicist (I'll call him Ted, after a teacher I had in high school who like to indulge in the evenings after class. We called him ToastTed. That's who I picture when the Old Man tells this story.) didn't see the connection. So, the Old Man started with his points one at a time, 1st law of motion: An object in motion tends to remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force. In a psychological and social context, humans tend to move single-mindedly both individually and in groups (not necessarily in the same directions, the individual and the group, that is). Social movements historically continue on and on and on until they collide with an opposing social movement. Then, their mass and their velocity determine their relative inertial dispositions with respect to the other and a change in movement or the death of the movement is experienced. Newton's second law of motion: F=ma. In Physics, a collision is either elastic or inelastic, meaning the boats either bounce off each other like that cabin cruiser that bounced off the ferry, or they stick together, like that charter boat that ended up on top of the J-boat. An example of an elastic moral collision might be the Nazi Party and the established social movement of the rest of Europe. Both moral systems were hard and clashed directly, so they hit and bounced off each other with the established social system having more momentum and breaking up Fascism. The third law of motion states that the force exerted upon one body by another is equally exerted upon the other body, as well. This speaks directly to the idea of the conservation of energy. Since no energy is lost or created, Much of the energy of the lesser system was transferred to the greater system, but small pieces of the broken up system still swirls around today. The analogy of an inelastic cultural or moral collision makes me think of the growth of Christianity. When the ideas of Christianity moved into a new area, they often absorbed the cultural and ethical (practices) of the other cultures, thus the growth of Christianity across Europe and the World looks more like a collecting of cultural energy rather than the creation of new energy. However, in such collisions, the motion will eventually slow so that the sum total of all vectors establish the final motion of the larger, growing object. Just look at where the Catholic Church is today.
In the marina bar, that evening, the Physicist agreed that all these points had merit, "but," he said, "what about entropy?" The Old Man looked Ted up and down, his dishevelled hair, his stained shirt, his holed topsiders, and he said, "Ted, have you looked in the mirror lately?"
Ted's eyes grew wide and he responded, "By God, you're right."
-Will (Dragonfly)
Ethics is about behavior, action, motion, in a sense. The Old Man talks a lot about the idea of there being a direct analogy between Physics and Morality (Morality being the principles upon which ethical behaviors are based). He once met a retired Physicist at a marina who had basically become a recluse on his sailboat and never left the marina. The Old Man invited him to a drink at the marina bar and presented him with this idea. The laws of motion, conservation of energy, they all have their moral analogue. The physicist (I'll call him Ted, after a teacher I had in high school who like to indulge in the evenings after class. We called him ToastTed. That's who I picture when the Old Man tells this story.) didn't see the connection. So, the Old Man started with his points one at a time, 1st law of motion: An object in motion tends to remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force. In a psychological and social context, humans tend to move single-mindedly both individually and in groups (not necessarily in the same directions, the individual and the group, that is). Social movements historically continue on and on and on until they collide with an opposing social movement. Then, their mass and their velocity determine their relative inertial dispositions with respect to the other and a change in movement or the death of the movement is experienced. Newton's second law of motion: F=ma. In Physics, a collision is either elastic or inelastic, meaning the boats either bounce off each other like that cabin cruiser that bounced off the ferry, or they stick together, like that charter boat that ended up on top of the J-boat. An example of an elastic moral collision might be the Nazi Party and the established social movement of the rest of Europe. Both moral systems were hard and clashed directly, so they hit and bounced off each other with the established social system having more momentum and breaking up Fascism. The third law of motion states that the force exerted upon one body by another is equally exerted upon the other body, as well. This speaks directly to the idea of the conservation of energy. Since no energy is lost or created, Much of the energy of the lesser system was transferred to the greater system, but small pieces of the broken up system still swirls around today. The analogy of an inelastic cultural or moral collision makes me think of the growth of Christianity. When the ideas of Christianity moved into a new area, they often absorbed the cultural and ethical (practices) of the other cultures, thus the growth of Christianity across Europe and the World looks more like a collecting of cultural energy rather than the creation of new energy. However, in such collisions, the motion will eventually slow so that the sum total of all vectors establish the final motion of the larger, growing object. Just look at where the Catholic Church is today.
In the marina bar, that evening, the Physicist agreed that all these points had merit, "but," he said, "what about entropy?" The Old Man looked Ted up and down, his dishevelled hair, his stained shirt, his holed topsiders, and he said, "Ted, have you looked in the mirror lately?"
Ted's eyes grew wide and he responded, "By God, you're right."
-Will (Dragonfly)
There has, and I suspect always will be, a fair amount of discussion about the ColRegs. How should we act? (I don't use this phrase very much because I think it should be assumed, but...) In my humble opinion, the most fundamental philosophical question is "What should I do? How should I behave?" We often get lost in pursuit of that question with a desire for righteousness and self-affirmation from others. In many of the discussions about the Collision Regulations, the fundamental purpose of their establishment gets lost in the details of prescriptive behavior. Don't collide with another vessel. Like Confucius or Epicurus who laid out some very specific examples of how to behave, they establish a set of rules to guide a captain when faced with various situations, but the fundamental purpose is to avoid collisions, not to give one captain right-of-way over another. We get lost in the specifics. As with both Confucians and Epicureans, the followers become overly rigid in their adherence to the rule and can find themselves running afoul of the spirit of the rule. "That guy is the give-way vessel. If HE causes and accident, it is all his fault." Yes, but don't collide. What is the fundamental principle? the Buddhists have the saying, "To enter the water without leaving a ripple." Don't collide. This is a social montra, yet there are those who try to take it to a literal conclusion and actually practice entering the water quietly and ripple free. A fun exercise, but it misses the point. Look around, Pay attention, be the sailor you are proud to be and don't collide no matter who is "in the wrong".
-Will (Dragonfly)
." Yes, but don't collide. What is the fundamental principle? the Buddhists have the saying, "To enter the water without leaving a ripple." Don't collide. This is a social montra, yet there are those who try to take it to a literal conclusion and actually practice entering the water quietly and ripple free. A fun exercise, but it misses the point. Look around, Pay attention, be the sailor you are proud to be and don't collide no matter who is "in the wrong".-Will (Dragonfly)
Steering a course isn't easy. For the practiced, it can be second nature, but as a young boy, my helmsmanship could be judged by the snake trail of a wake I left behind in the water. As much as I may have deviated from the proper course, the sum total (average) always worked out (I had extremely competent oversight).
On those long long long (there were extra hours added into the night just for my watch) two hour watches. I spent a lot of time letting my mind wander. Then I'd hear, "Willy! What's our heading?"
I'd pause to answer. Let the boat come back up or down the 15 degrees to the proper course, then I'd answer (Didn't want to lie). "135" (or whatever it was supposed to be), maybe we were heading to Dry Tortugas.
It's the middle of the night and the waves were big, it was hard keeping it EXACTLY on course!
I could never understand how the Old Man knew our course was off when he was down below. Then I learned by paying attention over time. Your boat feels different when it falls off-course. Sometimes you are down below and can't just check your compass or look at the landmarks, you have to use other senses to know. This is true in ALL of life. There are times, maybe most of them, when you're head is down and your "moral compass" isn't easy to see. You have to be sensitive to your relationships with the vessels and the ocean around you. If you set your course down wind and the seas are lifting and dropping your stern gently. You don't need a compass to tell you that that quartering rocking means you're off course and you are about to experience a big hard jibe. Things can break and leave you mastless when that happens. Then, you're just adrift, moving as the ocean wills instead of at your own will.
Pay attention, learn what your boat feels like and what your chosen course feels like and above all, don't let me steer.
-Will (Dragonfly)
On those long long long (there were extra hours added into the night just for my watch) two hour watches. I spent a lot of time letting my mind wander. Then I'd hear, "Willy! What's our heading?"
I'd pause to answer. Let the boat come back up or down the 15 degrees to the proper course, then I'd answer (Didn't want to lie). "135" (or whatever it was supposed to be), maybe we were heading to Dry Tortugas.
It's the middle of the night and the waves were big, it was hard keeping it EXACTLY on course
!I could never understand how the Old Man knew our course was off when he was down below. Then I learned by paying attention over time. Your boat feels different when it falls off-course. Sometimes you are down below and can't just check your compass or look at the landmarks, you have to use other senses to know. This is true in ALL of life. There are times, maybe most of them, when you're head is down and your "moral compass" isn't easy to see. You have to be sensitive to your relationships with the vessels and the ocean around you. If you set your course down wind and the seas are lifting and dropping your stern gently. You don't need a compass to tell you that that quartering rocking means you're off course and you are about to experience a big hard jibe. Things can break and leave you mastless when that happens. Then, you're just adrift, moving as the ocean wills instead of at your own will.
Pay attention, learn what your boat feels like and what your chosen course feels like and above all, don't let me steer.
-Will (Dragonfly)
jssailem
SBO Weather and Forecasting Forum Jim & John
- Oct 22, 2014
- 21,998
Oh Will. You are on a melancholy moment. What gives brother. That is some deep memories.
I wouldn't call those memories meloncholy. They are sweet though.
I went last night to listen to Peppino D'Agustino play in Gorham, NH. We went with a friend who is, himself, an accomplished classical guitarist and international, if unheard of, musician. Incredible performance and amazing techniques. The kind of playing that, rather than leave you thinking, 'I might as well give up on playing altogether', his playing was inspiring. I just don't have the time. Oh well, there is so much to try to do to accomplish, my musicianship, or lack there of, is not a big deal. I'm on another course. There are still new lands to explore ahead.
-Will (Dragonfly)
I went last night to listen to Peppino D'Agustino play in Gorham, NH. We went with a friend who is, himself, an accomplished classical guitarist and international, if unheard of, musician. Incredible performance and amazing techniques. The kind of playing that, rather than leave you thinking, 'I might as well give up on playing altogether', his playing was inspiring. I just don't have the time. Oh well, there is so much to try to do to accomplish, my musicianship, or lack there of, is not a big deal. I'm on another course. There are still new lands to explore ahead.
-Will (Dragonfly)
Did you arrive or miss the target completely?
When I set a plan or course, I ask the crew too. We look at the weather forecast, sea state and prevailing winds.
We decide our course based on the desired outcome.
But...
We have been surprised, during our sail, that external events control our course.
Using the sailing skills of our past, we managed current events and arrived back to the calmer safe home berth.
Sometimes with new tales of High Seas Adventures, sometimes with a mild sunburn or sore muscles.
But...
We still want to sail again!
_______
When we were caught in a squall, we survived using our sailing skills and sensory inputs.
However, we improved our skills and added some other tools to insure our future courses are better.
Jim...
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we never missed. Of course we had Loran C back then. I don't know what the range for that was. Yup
-Will (Dragonfly)
jssailem
SBO Weather and Forecasting Forum Jim & John
- Oct 22, 2014
- 21,998
Back in the day there was RDF. You just needed to be in the general area (close enough) to pick up the radio transmissions from the local station. Find the null and head in that direction. If the signal got weaker, Opps... Do a 180.
There have been a number of posts and threads about sailing couples. Most of us have a significant other that we take with us. Sometimes, the other isn't as into sailing as we are. The direction I'm heading here is in the multi-mind individual dynamics of relationships. A couple should be a single entity. This entity has managed to develop a separation of itself into two mostly independent actors. It helps facilitate a far wider set of tasks for survival then when limited to one body, one mind.
In researching a paper on the organization of the mind I drew parallels between the organization of a city and that of the human brain. There was a central area that controlled most of the important functions of government and areas that controlled education and learning, areas that handled the distribution of energy and sustenance. There were right side thinkers and left side thinkers. Cities have an identity, ways they think of themselves. They interact with the outside and respond as a single organism to threats or bounty. They create alliances and cultivate friends and enemies. They have memory that is both centralized (libraries and universities) and distributed (monuments and physical evidence of change as well as is citizenry). The same could be said for the sailing couple. When they work well, they work as one unit that can act independently towards the same goals.
What's also interesting about this concept is how sometimes the philosophy of the compound organism doesn't match the individual's philosophy, but rather takes pieces from its constituant parts and synthesizes its own unique personality as well as direction. When the couple doesn't get along, the couple organism often becomes paralyzed and movement of the couple stops, may even reverse direction.
What do you think? Is your relationship one of a single entity with two independent actors or do you not believe in such weird thoughts?
-Will (Dragonfly)
In researching a paper on the organization of the mind I drew parallels between the organization of a city and that of the human brain. There was a central area that controlled most of the important functions of government and areas that controlled education and learning, areas that handled the distribution of energy and sustenance. There were right side thinkers and left side thinkers. Cities have an identity, ways they think of themselves. They interact with the outside and respond as a single organism to threats or bounty. They create alliances and cultivate friends and enemies. They have memory that is both centralized (libraries and universities) and distributed (monuments and physical evidence of change as well as is citizenry). The same could be said for the sailing couple. When they work well, they work as one unit that can act independently towards the same goals.
What's also interesting about this concept is how sometimes the philosophy of the compound organism doesn't match the individual's philosophy, but rather takes pieces from its constituant parts and synthesizes its own unique personality as well as direction. When the couple doesn't get along, the couple organism often becomes paralyzed and movement of the couple stops, may even reverse direction.
What do you think? Is your relationship one of a single entity with two independent actors or do you not believe in such weird thoughts?
-Will (Dragonfly)